CfP OSL Research Day 2025 ‘Feelings and Flesh: Affect, Health, and the Textual Body’

/in /by

When/Where: Utrecht University (Belle van Zuylenzaal, Academiegebouw), 27 October 2025, 13:00-18:00.
Organizers: Dr Femi Eromosele, Dr Adele Bardazzi, and Prof. Birgit Kaiser (Utrecht University)
Keynote: Prof. Stuart Murray (University of Leeds)
Credits: It will be possible to obtain 1EC either by giving a presentation during the Research Day, or by submitting a short assignment (please find assignment details below). NB: The CfP is open to both colleagues and ReMA or PhD candidates at any stage in their studies. Credits can only be awarded to humanities ReMA and PhD students from Dutch universities.

Registration will open on 4 September 2025 VIA THIS LINK.

OSL Research Day –  Complete programme

While serving as a meeting occasion for the entire OSL community, the 2025 OSL Research Day will take the shape of a symposium focusing on a specific theme – namely the intersections of Medical Humanities and Affect Theory, examining how literature and cultural narratives mediate experiences of illness, embodiment, and care. The symposium asks: how do literary and artistic representations of illness shape the way we suffer, heal, and endure? How does affect – pain, anxiety, hope, frustration – structure the experience of illness and medical intervention? How do different genres, from lyric poetry to the illness memoir, from fiction to medical case studies, construct or challenge dominant narratives of health and disability?

Illness is not only a biological event but also a deeply affective and culturally embedded experience. Literature, philosophy, and the arts have long shaped the ways we understand, remember, and respond to sickness and care. From the lyric’s capacity to register bodily vulnerability to the memoir’s role in narrativising pain and recovery, from queer and feminist critiques of medical authority to environmental humanities’ focus on illness in the Anthropocene, this symposium examines how literature and cultural texts both reflect and resist dominant medical discourses.

The Research Day invites scholars working in the fields of literary studies, affect theory, and the medical humanities to interrogate the affective, ethical, and political stakes of health and illness across diverse literary traditions and historical contexts.

Key themes may include but are not limited to:

  • Narratives of illness and disability, from memoirs to autofiction, and their role in shaping collective and subjective experiences of suffering.
  • Cruel optimism in medical discourse: when treatments, institutions, or social scripts sustain life yet cause suffering.
  • The aesthetics of pain and care: how literature gives form to embodied distress and medicalised subjectivities.
  • Affect, medicine, and genre: how different literary forms (e.g., poetry, prose, drama, speculative fiction) construct experiences of illness and healing.
  • Gender, queerness, and medical narratives: how illness intersects with experiences of gendered and sexualised embodiment, including histories of pathologisation and resistance.
  • Health narratives and new genres of media: how emergent genres of media shape old and new concepts of health and wellness.

Proposal Submission

Proposals for 15-20 minute presentations (200 words) should be sent along with a short biographical note to Femi Eromosele (e.f.eromosele[at]uu.nl) by August 15, 2025.

Programme

13:00 – 13:30: Walk-in, Welcome and Introduction

13:30 – 14:30: Keynote: Prof. Stuart Murray, “Restless Nights: Sleep, Bodies and Health in Modern and Contemporary Literature” + Q&A

Chaired by Femi Eromosele

14:30 – 15:00: Coffee Break (Westerdijkkamer)

15:00 – 16:15: Panel 1

Chaired by Andries Hiskes

  1.  Jesse van Amelsvoort (University of Amsterdam): Reading for Affect in Dutch Gay Literature
  1.  Haizhi Wu (University College, London): “Can’t You See She’s Grieving?” AIDS Death and Adolescent Grievability in At Risk and Tell the Wolves I’m Home
  1.  Jason Mariotis (Utrecht University): Alone or Lonely in the 19th Century? A comparative case study of literary representations of Solitude in Romantic Literature
  1.  Ida Hillerup Hansen (Utrecht University): The Stories Biomedical Psychiatry Tells About Life Through Grief as Diagnosis

16:15 – 16:30: Coffee Break (Westerdijkkamer)

16:30 – 18:00: Panel 2

Chaired by  Marguérite Corporaal

  1.  Louise Benson James (Ghent University): Gut Health and Mental Wellbeing in Medicine and Popular Fiction, 1870s-1930s
  2.  Avril Tynan (University of Turku): Recovery Narratives: Contesting Stories of Triumph and Closure
  3.  Karen D. van Minnen (University of Amsterdam): Cabinteely Heartaches: Echoes from St. Gabriel’s Trapdoor
  4.  Marileen La Haije, Constanza Lobos Campusano (Radbound University): Imagining Worlds from Pain: Memory, Mutual Support and Justice in Espacio Tecla’s Fanzines

18:00-18:30: Wrap up and Drinks (Westerdijkkamer)

Abstract: Stuart Murray “Restless Nights: Sleep, Bodies and Health in Modern and Contemporary Literature”  

In this talk I will explore literary depictions of sleep and sleeplessness across the modern and contemporary periods. I will focus especially on how sleep is an everyday biological phenomenon that is nevertheless always mobile and socially and culturally contingent, as well as a challenge to narrative representation. I will discuss how the meaning of sleep in Modernist literature is interwoven with questions of technology, productivity and embodied subjectivity, exemplified in works by HG Wells, Franz Kafka, Jean Cocteau, Katherine Mansfield and Djuna Barnes. In the contemporary period, I will discuss how fiction engages with what has been termed the ‘sleep crisis’, particularly in speculative narratives that present bodies at times of pandemic and other contexts of apocalypse. The talk will ask whether it is possible to see sleep as a presence or only understand it through its absence, whether it is purely individual or can be constituted as communal, and how it might configure questions of health through associations with bodies, objects, resistance and justice.

Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literature in the School of English at the University of Leeds in the UK. He is the author of six monographs, most recently Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines (2023) and Disability and the Posthuman: Bodies, Technology and Cultural Futures (2020), and the editor/co-editor of five other books. He has written widely on the interrelations of disability, embodied technology, cultural theory, and health in literature and film from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His new research project is on sleep and modernism.



Assignment for 1EC:

Students can obtain 1EC by attending the Research Day and submitting a short pass/fail report on the keynote lecture and/or one chosen panel (800-1000 words in total). The report should include at least three references to primary or secondary sources, and possibly (if applicable) a reflection on how the texts/approaches discussed during the Research Day relate to the student’s own research interests. The assignment should be sent to osl@rug.nl by 21 November 2025, end of day.