2-Day Conference: Medical Identities in Global History

2-Day Conference: Medical Identities in Global History

10-11 March 2022

St Luke's Chapel, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Oxford

Approaches to global history often attempt to address the role of nation-states in the construction of historical narratives, while deconstructing the Eurocentric assumptions in the expression of history. Historians have now moved away from understanding history in terms of binaries and accepted that transfer, spread, diffusion, understanding of knowledge is multi-directional. In the history of medicine, these translations often involve the generation, negotiation, and interaction of identities.

This conference seeks to bring together postgraduate students, early career researchers, and scholars in history for a two-day conference on the topic of medical identities in the past. Medical identities are grounded in the interactions between self, body, and health, with the social, political, cultural, and intellectual context of medical knowledge. Interrogations of these relationships in a global historical perspective reveal important narratives of identity creation and complex webs of power relations.

In addition to panel presentations from a selection of speakers, this conference will host three engagement conversations: one focused on building collaborative networks amongst participants, one on public outreach, and one round-table discussion for Early Career Researchers.

This conference will showcase two Keynote addresses, by Marius Turda and Mark Harrison.