International conference: Stories of Illness / Disability in Literature and Comics : Intersections of the Medical, the Personal, and the Cultural
This two-day academic conference examined the ways in which knowledge and experience of illness and disability circulate within the realms of medicine, art, the personal and the cultural. We invited papers to address this question from a variety of different perspectives, including literary scholarship, comics studies, media studies, disability studies, and health humanities/ sociology/ geography. Launching the conference was an exhibition of comics dealing with medicine, illness/ disability, and caregiving, presented in the permanent pathological collection of the Berlin Medical History Museum at the Charité established by Rudolf Virchow.
Hörsaalruine | exhibition/conference opening night |
Bildquelle: Bernd Wannenmacher
Conference keynote speaker: Leigh Gilmore (Wellesley College)
Author of The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (2001)
and Tainted Witness: Why we doubt what women say about their lives (2017)
The exhibition SICK! Kranksein im Comic | Reclaiming Illness in Comics (which runs from 27 October to 4 March 2018) opened Thursday, October 26, 2017 with talks by two of the central figures of the graphic medicine movement: MK Czerwiec, nurse and author of the comic Taking Turns. Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 (2017), and Ian Williams, physician and author of the comic The Bad Doctor. The Troubled Life and Times of Dr. Iwan James (2015) (www.graphicmedicine.org).
This conference was made possible by the Einstein Foundation Berlin, the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies and Freie Universität Berlin.
Zeit & Ort
27.10.2017 - 29.10.2017
Hörsaalruine
Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité
Charitéplatz 1, 10117, Berlin, Germany