Contagionism and Contagious Diseases in Medicine and Literature between 1880 and 1933

Newcastle, UK. 25th August - 27th August 2011

The Conference will address three main themes:

• Construction of Key Diseases
  The way in which infectious diseases are caught in medical, philosophical and literary discourses around 1900.

• Infection as Metaphor
  The development, around 1900, of ‘infection’ and ‘contamination’ into powerful metaphors laced with a wide range of political, imperialist and colonialist implications.
  

• Narrativity
  The narrative potential of bacteriology and infectiology in popular depictions, raising issues of poeticity and genre, along with questions as to the suitability of such narratives for fictional worlds.
  

Organised by Dr Thomas Rütten (Northern Centre for the History of Medicine, Newcastle University) and Dr Martina King (Institut für Deutsche Philologie, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich and School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Glasgow University).

Panelists:

Thomas Anz (Marburg)
“Techniken der Emotionalisierung beim Erzählen über Infektionskrankheiten in der literarischen Moderne”

Paul Bishop (Glasgow)
“Mimetic Desire, Contagion and Violence in Kafka”

Olaf Briese (Berlin)

“‘Social Bacteriology’. Sociology, criminology, and cultural anthropology in the slipstream of infection”

Yahya Elsaghe (Bern)
"Contagious Diseases in Max Frisch"

Christoph Gradmann (Oslo)
“Exotism, Bacteriology, and the Staging of the Dangerous/Other ”

Rudolf Käser (Aarau/Zürich)
“From the Survival of the Fittest to the Eclipse of the Last European. Values in German Narratives of Contagion around 1900”

Martina King (Munich/Glasgow)
“The Order of the Infectious. Microbe Hunting in European Literature from Wells to Weiss”

Luis Montiel (Madrid)
“On Psychic contagion in Gustav Meyrink’s works”

George S. Rousseau (Oxford)
“How did Same-Sex Partners become Contagious; or, Gays and the Contagion Metaphor”

Thomas Rütten (Newcastle)
"Thomas Mann's reception of the discourse on genialising properties of contagious diseases in The Magic Mountain and Doktor Faustus"

Nicholas Saul (Durham)
“‘[…] eine für sie ganz neue Form von Bakterien’. Contagionism and its Consequences in Laβwitz and Wells”

Anja Schonlau (Göttingen)
“The Construction of the Syphilitic Genius in Literature around 1900”

Priscilla Wald (Durham, USA)
"Literary Contagion and the Emergence of 'American Literature'"

Paul Weindling (Oxford)
“The Island as Aetiological Laboratory: The Dilemmas of Arrowsmith”

Yvonne Wübben (Bochum)
“Auto-immunisation and ‘adamant necessity’: Typhus on the Stages of Knowledge around 1900”

Contact details for further information:

For more information about the Conference, please visit the programme page.

or contact PD Dr Thomas Rütten or our Centre Administrator Laura Cresser.

Online registration forms will be available soon and a link will be available on this page. If you would like to be notified when registration opens, please contact Laura Cresser.

For travel information, please see how to get to Newcastle.

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