RISe Thematic Workshop: Bodies

Wednesday, 30 January 2013
12:00 – 14:00
Location: CRASSH, Alison Richard Building, S3 (Third Floor)

List of Participants

This page lists the participants to the thematic workshop, with their contact details and a short statement on their research and/or their interest in the workshop's theme (in less than 10 lines).

Note: In order to edit these pages you will have to register (link at top right). If you do not wish to register directly, email the RISe Co-ordinator (crasshpd AT hermes.cam.ac.uk) to request a dummy registration account; be sure to identify yourself by name for any comments you make for the benefit of the other participants.

Naures Atto

Contact details: Faculty of Divinity

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Zerrin Biner

Contact details: Division of Social Anthropology

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John Creese

Contact details: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

Statement: I'm an archaeologist interested in the interplay between embodied practices (such as crafting, moving through architecture), bodily representations in plastic art, and postmortem bodily interventions in small-scale indigenous societies of eastern North America.  My work examines how changes in these practices from the 14th to the 17th centuries were part of a shift in the social construction of personhood vis-a-vis emerging corporate institutions (especially the 'House' and 'Village').

Isla Fay

Contact details: Department of History and Philosophy of Science

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Vanessa Heggie

Contact details: Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Statement: I'm a historian of medicine and related sciences, so human bodies play a particularly important role in my work.  Generally I've looked at how human bodies and human identities interact, and the ways in which the human body engages with the natural and social world, as well as being interested in how human bodies are used as yardsticks, tools and experimental objects.  Specifically, my major research projects have considered: degeneration and healthy social bodies around 1900, the history of sports medicine and exercise physiology, and most recently the history of exploration and survival in extreme environments.

Abby Hoffmann

Contact details: Department of History and Philosophy of Science

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Ewan Jones

Contact details: Trinity Hall

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Laura Kirkley

Contact details: Trinity Hall; Department of French

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I work on primarily in the fields of French and English literature, focussing specifically on women’s writing. The majority of my research has dealt with texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but I am also interested in contemporary material. I am interested in how women construct their identities and define their feminism in the interstices of multiple languages and cultures. This involves identifying networks of influence, through which women writers translate feminist ideas and motifs across the boundaries of nation and culture. I am beginning to explore the ways in which essentialist imagery, drawn from the female body and historically complicit with patriarchal myth, is appropriated and transformed by feminist writers working from different cultural contexts.

Sheila Kohring

Contact details: Division of Archaeology

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Christos Lynteris

Contact details: CRASSH

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Victoria Mills

Contact details: Darwin College

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My research focuses on the relationship between bodies and things in nineteenth-century literature and culture. In particular, I explore how authors such as Henry James, Oscar Wilde and George Eliot use collecting narratives to explore aspects of gender identity. I am interested in the ways in which subjects and objects merge, transform and possess each other and in how Victorian fiction explores the subject-object binary. I examine how the relationship between past and present can be mediated through things and bodily objects, focusing on the physical forms of collected objects and the ways in which a sensual record of these is recorded in fiction. In my work on late nineteenth- century bibliomania, for example, I show how eroticism derived from the interplay between the senses dominates the corporeal experience of male bibliophiles.

Hannah Newton

Contact details: Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Statement:

I'm a social historian of early modern England, undertaking a Wellcome Trust Fellowship on the subject of recovery from illness in England, 1580-1720. The project grew out my book, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, which examines perceptions and treatments of children's bodies and diseases, and the child's own experience of illness. The theme of 'bodies' is integral to both projects. Focusing here my current project, it asks how doctors and laypeople defined and explained recovery, and explores the emotional, spiritual, and physical experiences of recovering patients. Early modern medicine classified 'bodies' into three groups: healthful, unhealthful, and neutral. The neutral category was where 'recovery' fitted - it was a liminal state for those bodies that were 'neither sick nor sound', such as those falling ill, recovering, or frail. Recovering bodies were ‘floting between both...extreames' of sickness and health, 'as a brown colour which consists of the mixture of white and black’, exhibiting characteristics of both states. Lemnius Levinus, a 16th-century physician, provides a vivid description of the recovering body: ‘men newly recovered be weak and feeble, and…wasted with the di|sease…their body is lean and starved...he is like a Traveller that is got out of Theives hands, he yet pants and trembles, and is not wholly re|stored from the great fear and danger of his life he was in...so a sick man, though when his disease is gone, he begins to go abroad, and find all things better with him, yet some footsteps of the disease stay yet in his body'. 'Footsteps' referred to the lingering imperfections and weaknesses that remained after illness. One of my aims is to uncover the care that was provided to convalescents to help resolve these footsteps, and restore full health.

Rune Nyord

Contact details: Christ's College, St Andrew's Street, Cambridge CB2 3BU. Email: rn321@cam.ac.uk.

Statement: 

I’m an Egyptologist working on two main projects, both with a strong focus on bodies. The first project deals with conceptions of the body in the Nag Hammadi texts (composed between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE). The “Gnostic” worldview expressed by these texts is often described as being filled with hatred of all that belongs to this world – not least the human body. At the same time, the texts abound with references to the body and its parts, not only in myths where bodies occur, but also in a number of figurative descriptions and metaphors in which the body and its parts are employed as concrete ways of approaching the principally inexpressible reality which lies beyond or behind the world, sometimes providing a much more positive image of the body as a divine matrix.

My second project deals with pharaonic Egyptian mortuary religion in the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000-1600 BCE). In the traditional Egyptian worldview, the post-mortem fate of human beings was closely bound up with the notion of a bodily transformation. Through the process of mummification and associated rituals, the deceased is transformed into a divine being who functions as an important mediator between the daily concerns of the living descendants and the world beyond where the gods and ancestors are a source of protection and fertility for the living.

Isabelle Vella Gregory

Contact details: Christ's College.

Statement: As an archaeologist, I am interested in humanity and the way in which people constructed and manipulated their worlds. Bodies may seem like an obvious 'thing' that archaeologists do, yet archaeology is not merely about skeletons. Archaeology is a very multi-disciplinary subject, simply because we are trying to understand the complexity that constitutes humanity. My current research is based on the island of Malta and its prehistoric temples. Current research themes include: monumentality, memory, social complexity, technology and the body. I'm particularly interested in figuration, how bodies construct space and the relationship between technology and the body. I'm always interested in multi-disciplinary discussion and collaboration, in particular seminars and conferences and publishing research.