How do nonfiction accounts reflect, shape, and critique our understanding of threats to human health? This seminar invites papers that explore the intersection of health and medicine with the expressive potential of literary nonfiction. We seek to bring together writers and scholars working in related disciplines—disability studies, health/environmental humanities, life writing, journalism, literary nonfiction, media studies, narrative medicine—to critically examine how nonfiction accounts communicate individual experience, social issues, and relationality within health and medicine. 
    The remit of the seminar is broad, welcoming scholarship on essays, life-writing (personal narrative, auto/biography, memoir, pathography, etc.), literary journalism, narrative medicine, graphic medicine, within a variety of media (print, podcasts, film, social media, etc.). Thematic concerns may include (but are not limited to): healing, mental health/anxiety, trauma, pandemics, environmental threats, patient-doctor relationships, health and medical systems.
    
Toward an interdisciplinary dialogue, consider questions such as:

• What are the cultural and linguistic contexts that emerge in these accounts?

• What are the impetus and audience for these works?

• What poetic and aesthetic strategies work to engage the audience?

• How do such works contribute to a sense of common concerns regarding human health?

• How do such works reveal disparities in care or advocate for change?

• How might these works reveal “the urgency and possibilities of transforming communities of care”? (KL Thornber)

• What currents of media or publishing can be traced through these works?