The Keats Foundation announces its second bicentenary conference
The Keats Foundation announces its second bicentenary conference, to be held from the afternoon of Friday 1 until the evening of Sunday 3 May 2015 at Guy’s Hospital London. The conference marks the 200th anniversary of John Keats enrolling to study medicine at Guy’s Hospital in 1815.
Confirmed speakers include Druin Birch, Jeffrey Cox, Stuart Curran, Damian Walford Davies, Jenny Uglow, R. S. White.
The conference will be held on the 29th floor of Guy’s Hospital Tower Building – with extensive views of the City of London.
We will visit the surroundings of Guy’s Hospital, including the celebrated John Keats statue in the quadrangle. One of our receptions will be held in the Old Operating Theatre at Guy’s, giving participants an opportunity to gather around the operating table with glasses of wine. Our second reception and buffet-banquet will be held in private, wood-panelled rooms at the historic seventeenth-century George Inn – London’s only surviving galleried inn.
Call for papers:
Proposals for 20-minute papers are invited, under the broad heading of ‘John Keats: Poet-Physician / Physician-Poet’. While there is no exclusive requirement as to topics, we welcome papers on the relation of Keats’s poetry, letters, life and times to any of the following:
Medicine / poetry and medicine
Romantic-era hospitals
Medical training
Surgery / dissection / anatomy
Prescriptions and the pharmacopoeia
Infection / disease
Tuberculosis / consumption
Healing
Women’s health
Medical texts
Wounds
Nerves
Mercury
Hypochondria
Melancholia
Hallucination and drugs
Well-being
States of Mind
The Senses
The Moon
Alchemy and Magic
Plants and Herbs
This list offers some starting points for presentations and is not intended in any way to limit possible topics and themes for paper presentation. For obvious reasons, however, all papers should have a Keatsian focus.
Please send 200-word proposals as an email attached document to the conference administrator, Hrileena Ghosh [email protected] by 1 March 2015. Please ensure that your proposal is headed with your paper title, your name, institutional affiliation, and an e-mail contact address. Acceptances will be issued very shortly after 1 March 2015; please let us know if you have a deadline for travel or funding.
Please note: the conference registration fee will be confirmed when Registration opens in March 2015, and is likely to be in the region of £150 (full rate)/£90 (postgraduates and unwaged), inclusive of the two receptions; £100/£50 conference attendance only. Lunches, coffees, teas, biscuits, cakes and other refreshments are all included, as are conference stationary and electronic resources. We hope to reduce the conference fee further, numbers permitting. When submitting your paper proposal, please would you indicate whether you would like to attend the receptions. Every effort has been made to keep registration fees to a minimum. Travel and accommodation arrangements are left to delegates’ discretion.
