MLA 2019 Health Humanities/Medical Humanities Sessions

The MLA Medical Humanities and Health Studies Forum is hosting or co-hosting two sessions at the MLA convention in January 2019:

1) 203: Health Humanities and Digital Life
8:30 AM–9:45 AM Friday, Jan 4, 2019 Hyatt Regency – Columbus H
Session Information
Description: This interdisciplinary roundtable is a critical exploration of the intersection of medical and health humanities with the digital humanities. Panelists present—and respond to—urgent textual, theoretical, ethical, and activist concerns that reflect the mutually constitutive engagements of health, illness, pain, and well-being in the digital realm. Related Material: For related material, visit medicalhumanities.mla.hcommons.org

Speakers
Nehal El-Hadi, U of Toronto
Kirsten Ostherr, Rice U
Amanda Greene, U of Michigan, Ann Arbor
John Barber, Washington State U, Vancouver
Olivia Banner, U of Texas, Dallas
Presider – Andrea Charise, U of Toronto

2) 704: Graphic Medicine’s Textual Transactions
12:00 PM–1:15 PM Sunday, Jan 6, 2019
Hyatt Regency – Toronto
Session Information
Presentations
1: Graphic Medicine and Patient Education: Using Graphic Narrative to Improve Patient Care
Brian Callender, U of Chicago
2: Subject to or Subject Of: Medicine, Subjectivity, and the Representation of Disability in Una posibilidad entre mil
Elizabeth Jones, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hil
3: Multimodal Graphic MMedicine and the Material Question of Spoons
Rachel Kunert-Graf, Antioch
Respondent – Erin Lamb, Hiram C
Presider -Lan Dong, U of Illinois, Springfield

In addition, other sessions will be of interest:

038: Aging, Care, and Humor Time: 12:00PM-1:15PM Thursday, Jan 3, 2019 Location: Hyatt Regency – Toronto Presentations 1: What’s So Funny about Women and Age? Psychoanalysis, Humor, and Cathleen Schine’s Recent Novels Nancy C. Backes, Cardinal Stritch U
2: ‘We Hang Up Laughing’: Laughter, Dementia, and the Subject Elizabeth Claire Barry, U of Warwick
3: Not Your (Grand)Mother’s Golden Years (or Is It?): An Analysis of the Aging Women Trope in Theater and Popular Culture Deborah Kochman, Florida State U
4: Comedy, Caring Tropes, and Broken Bodies Janna Klostermann, Carleton U

091: Literature and Empathy Time: 3:30PM -4:45 Thursday Jan 3rd, 2019 Location: Hyatt Regency – Grand Suite 3 Presentations 1: Empathetic Witnessing in Shakespeare’s King Lear Penelope H. Geng, Macalester C
2: Auden and Moore’s Empathic Humor Rachel V. Trousdale, Framingham State U
3: Difficulty, Empathy, and The Lives of Animals Benjamin Mangrum, U of Michigan, Ann Arbor

103: Debility and Disability Time: 3:30 PM – 4:45PM Thursday, Jan 3rd Location: Hyatt Regency – Columbus G Presentations 1: Invalid Modernism: A Diseased Aesthetic Michael Davidson, U of California, San Diego
2: Modernism, Debility, and Intellectual Disability Janet W. Lyon, Penn State U, University Park
3: Debility and Utopia: Revisiting Millennium Hall Travis Lau, U of Pennsylvania

124: Probing the Victorian Corpus: Health Humanities Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Fiction Time: 5:15 PM – 6:30 PM Thursday, Jan 3, 2019 Location: Hyatt Regency – Michigan 2 Presentations 1: Statistical Panic, Redundant Women, and the Aging Novelist Anna Fenton-Hathaway, Northwestern U 2: Somatic Reading and Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel Livia Arndal Woods, Trinity C, CT
3: A ‘Cripistemology’ of Victorian Pain Travis Lau, U of Texas, Austin
4: Reimagining the Queer (After)Life of James Barry Jessica Kirwan, U of Florida

203: Health Humanities and Digital Life Time: 8:30AM-9:45AM – Friday Jan 4 2019 Location: Hyatt Regency – Columbus H Description: This interdisciplinary roundtable is a critical exploration of the intersection of medical and health humanities with the digital humanities. Panelists present—and respond to—urgent textual, theoretical, ethical, and activist concerns that reflect the mutually constitutive engagements of health, illness, pain, and well-being in the digital realm. Presiders: You. 255: Disability and Speculative Fiction Time: 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM Friday, Jan 4th Location: Hyatt Regency – Columbus G Presentations 1: The Value of Nonrealism and Speculative Fiction to Disability Studies Sami Schalk, U of Wisconsin, Madison
2: Crip Community Futurism: Speculative Fiction as a Space for Crip Community Building Cole Jack Pittman, U of California, Los Angeles
3: Meet Me at the Ice Bar: Fantasy, Surrealism, and Disability Petra Kuppers, U of Michigan, Ann Arbor

360: Disability and Affect Time: 5:15 PM – 6:30 PM Friday Location: Hyatt Regency – Columbus G Presentations 1: ‘My Mother, My Longest Lover’: Cripping South Texas in Noemi Martinez’s The South Texas Experience Zine Project (2005) and South Texas Experience: Love Letters (2015) Magda Garcia, U of California, Santa Barbara
2: Collateral Pain in Yoonmee Chang’s Three Poems and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life Kai Hang Cheang, U of California, Riverside
3: The Bathtub of Pleasure: Love Notes from Aquatherapy Kateřina Kolářová, Charles U
4: ‘It Took a Long Time to Arrive at Being Ill / without Falling’: Competing Conceptions of Suffering in Brian Teare’s The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven Declan Gould, U at Buffalo, State U of New York

361: Models of Caregiving Time: 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM Friday Jan 4, 2019 Location: Sheraton Grand – Michigan B Presentations 1: Staging the Maternal: Mother Figures in Cervantes and in the Comedia nueva Emilie L. Bergmann, U of California, Berkeley
2: The Picaresque Women Caregivers of Calderón’s Short Theater Elena Casey, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
3: Healing Voices and Communities of Care in Alonso de Castillo Solórzano’s Los alivios de Casandra Victor Sierra Matute, U of Pennsylvania
4: Raising the Outliers: Parenthood in Guillén de Castro’s La fuerza de la costumbre Emily Tobey, Miami U, Oxford
306: Disability, Disclosure, and the Academy Time: 1:45 PM – 3:00 PM Location: Hyatt Regency – Columbus G Presentations
1: On (Always) Passing: Letters to Deaf Scholars Brenda Brueggemann, U of Connecticut, Storrs
2: Navigating Disclosure: Queer Mad Exhaustion Shayda Kafai, California Polytechnic State U, Pomona
3: Being Blind and Belonging in Academia Laura Yvonne Bulk, U of British Columbia

331: Defining Bodies: Medical Discourses in German-Speaking Countries Time: 3:30PM-4:45PM Friday Jan 4th Location: Sheraton Grand – Michigan B Presentations 1: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Homeopathy Alice Kuzniar, U of Waterloo
2: Magnus Hirschfeld’s ‘Sexual Intermediaries’ Ute Bettray, Lafayette C
3: Medicine, Culture, and the Biopolitics of Modern Viennese Motherhood Alys George, New York U

360: Disability and Affect Time: 5:15 PM – 6:30 PM Friday Jan 4 Location: Hyatt Regency – Columbus G Presentations 1: ‘My Mother, My Longest Lover’: Cripping South Texas in Noemi Martinez’s The South Texas Experience Zine Project (2005) and South Texas Experience: Love Letters (2015) Magda Garcia, U of California, Santa Barbara
2: Collateral Pain in Yoonmee Chang’s Three Poems and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life Kai Hang Cheang, U of California, Riverside
3: The Bathtub of Pleasure: Love Notes from Aquatherapy Kateřina Kolářová, Charles U
4: ‘It Took a Long Time to Arrive at Being Ill / without Falling’: Competing Conceptions of Suffering in Brian Teare’s The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven
Declan Gould, U at Buffalo, State U of New York 534: Disability and the Global South: Current Conditions Time: 1:45 PM – 3:00 PM Saturday Jan 5 Location: Hyatt Regency – Columbus G Presentations
1: Paradoxical Dramaturgies: Disability and Egungun Performances in Wole Soyinka Nic Hamel, U of Texas, Austin
2: Madness, Disability Studies, and African Fiction: Reading Biyi Bandele’s The Sympathetic Undertaker and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North Ehijele Femi Eromosele, U of Witwatersrand
3: Amputation Is Not a Metaphor: Frantz Fanon and Colonial Debilitation Sarah Orsak, Rutgers U, New Brunswick
4: Citizen Bodies: Martyrdom, Disability, and Nationalism in the Iran-Iraq War Kimberly Canuette Grimaldi, U of Texas, Austin

538: Temporalities of Disability Time: 3:30 PM – 4:45PM Saturday, Jan 5 Location: Hyatt Regency – Michigan 1C Description: In exploring the temporal horizons of nineteenth-century disability narratives, this panel aims to open new lines of dialogue between disability studies and the robust scholarship on the politics and ethics of temporality produced by nineteenth-century Americanists such as Lloyd Pratt, Elizabeth Freeman, Dana Luciano, Wai Chee Dimock, and Cindy Weinstein. Panelists draw on theories of queer temporality, narrative temporality, and temporal biopolitics.

552: Disability Poetics: How Disability Becomes Embodies in Poetic Form Time: 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM Saturday, Jan 5 Location: Hyatt Regency – Columbus G Presentations 1: Cyborg and Implant Poetics
Meg Day, Franklin and Marshall C Jillian Weise, Clemson U
2: Tendings: Collaborations in Crip Space
Petra Kuppers, U of Michigan, Ann Arbor
3: Siting Sound in Deaf Poetics: Christine Sun Kim Michael Davidson, U of California, San Diego

589: This House of Clay: Disability and Religion in the Age of Milton Time: 5:15 PM – 6:30 PM Saturday Jan 5 Location: Hyatt Regency – Columbus G Presentations 1: Disability Studies and Biblical Representations in Milton’s Masterworks Angelica Alicia Duran, Purdue U, West Lafayette
2: Roads to or from the Contagious Hospital: Contexts for the Lazar House of Death in Paradise Lost, Book XI James Carson Nohrnberg, U of Virginia
3: Look at Will through Every Pore: Milton’s Fantasy of Bodily Vision Amrita Dhar, Ohio State U, Newark

678: Drugs In the Western Hemisphere: Reading and Teaching Cultural Portrayals of Addiction Time: 10:15 AM – 11:30 AM Sunday Jan 6 Location: Sheraton Grand – Goldcoast Description: Panelists focus on the reading and teaching of portrayals of addiction in cultural production from the western hemisphere, including perspectives focusing on Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Spain. Participants (including the audience) explore the social relevance of reading and teaching addiction from various critical perspectives.

703: Graphic Medicine’s Textual Transactions Time: 12:00PM-1:15 PM Sunday, Jan 6, 2019 Location: Hyatt Regency – Toronto Presentations: 1: Graphic Medicine and Patient Education: Using Graphic Narrative to Improve Patient Care Brian Callender, U of Chicago
2: Subject to or Subject Of: Medicine, Subjectivity, and the Representation of Disability in Una posibilidad entre mil Elizabeth Jones, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
3: Multimodal Graphic Medicine and the Material Question of Spoons Rachel Kunert-Graf, Antioch U