Bodies under Test
Description
This seminar explores the intertwined logics, aesthetics, discourses, and phenomenologies of health, embodiment, and experimentation.
It invites scholars to reflect on experimentation in its many senses: as scientific protocol and clinical procedure, but also as sensation, improvisation, and creative or political method. What does it mean to experiment with, through, against, or upon a body? How are such bodies rendered intelligible or anomalous—within regimes of evidence, through genre and form, or under the logics of race, gender, and coloniality? What are the political and socio-cultural consequences of being framed as an experiment or being subjected to one?
In medicine, experimentation has long structured how bodies are known, tested, healed, and pathologized. It encompasses trial participation, drug development, simulation, and repetition—but also the broader epistemologies that determine what counts as evidence or care. At the same time, cultural production offers its own forms of experimentation: narrative disruptions, speculative fictions, non-normative aesthetics, and hybrid genres that reflect and reconfigure embodied experience.
This seminar foregrounds embodiment as a lived process shaped by experimentation across multiple scales: from the internal shifts of illness and (dis)ability to the social scripts of gender and race, and the systemic violences of surveillance and control. It asks how cultural, literary, artistic, and audiovisual artifacts register these processes, and how critical methods—from disability studies and health humanities to trauma theory, posthumanism, and decolonial, queer, and Global South frameworks—can make them newly visible.
We are interested in papers engaging topics including (but not limited to):
- Embodiment beyond biomedical legibility (e.g., Indigenous, diasporic, Afro, or Latinx epistemologies)
- Overlaps and tensions between patients, test subjects, and clinical spectators
- Prosthetics, simulation, and augmentation as material and metaphor
- Illness, (dis)ability, and chronicity as sites of creative and political experimentation
- Genre and form as vehicles for experimenting with suffering, care, or resistance
- Feminist, queer, or posthumanist critiques of evidence-based frameworks
We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives that situate the experimental as a critical vector for rethinking corporeality, care, and the politics of health. How do bodies “under test” disrupt the logics that seek to stabilize them—and what forms of knowledge, perception, resistance, or becoming emerge in their wake?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Corinna Cape is a sixth year PhD candidate in English at Fordham University, where she focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and disability studies.
Speaker Bio
Lucy is interested in the genealogy of aesthetics and how it bears on mediations of the human as a singular concept. Currently, Lucy studies in Social and Political Thought at York University and teaches creative and critical thought at Toronto Metropolitan University and Sheridan College. She is currently working on her dissertation Uncanny Humanisms, which examines the human as an unstable aesthetic category underpinned by the uncanny.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Naomi is a second year PhD student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. She holds a B.A. in History and Spanish, with a minor in Latin American Studies, and a Certificate in Public History from Rutgers University. She also holds a Master’s degree in Hispanic Studies from Boston College.
Her research focuses on neuroscience, repression, and gender in Francoist Spain. As well as the effects science has left on literature, visual arts, and photography.
Speaker Bio
Felix Roessler is a fifth-year PhD Candidate at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where he also currently serves as RA Fellow at the Centre for Global Disability Studies. His dissertation explores twentieth and twenty-first century experimental disability poetics through the lens of materiality.
Speaker Bio
William F. Dwyer III helps run the Trondheim International School in Trondheim, Norway. His research focuses on literature and justice with the lens of post-structural theory. Recent publications include Nordlit 52, the opening chapter in Literature’s Critique Subversion, and Transformation of Justice, and Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 19.
Speaker Bio
Linda Istanbulli is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. She specializes in modern Arabic literature, with particular interest in questions of gender, memory, trauma, and cultural authority. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Middle Eastern Literatures, Contemporary Levant, and the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Haizhi Wu is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at University College London (UCL). His research examines AIDS/pandemic narratives in contemporary American fiction, with a particular focus on affect theory and the medical humanities. He can be reached at [email protected].
Speaker Bio
Ana María Pozo is an Assistant Professor at Agnes Scott College. Her scholarship specializes in Latin America from the nineteenth century to contemporary cultural production. Drawing from cultural studies, her work challenges the intersections of literature and scientific discourses, simulation and identity, being sick and playing sick, and how race, class, and gender affect cultural practices. One string of her work focuses on representations of horror and disease.
Speaker Bio
Aitor Bouso-Gavín (he/him/él) serves as lecturer and faculty director of Latinx Studies in the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights at Harvard University. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with a primary focus on U.S. Latinx and Caribbean literature, culture and visual arts. Aitor is currently working on his book manuscript, Geneaolgies of the Wound: Decolonial Healing and Resistance in Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Arts.
Speaker Bio
Ana Ugarte’s research examines the intersections between Health Humanities and Caribbean and Latin/x American literary studies. She is the author of Interocepción insular: Lo patológico en la imaginación literaria del laboratorio Caribe (Insular Interoception: The Pathological in the Literary Imagination of the Caribbean Laboratory).