Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science (SAHMS) Virtual Student Conference [deadline 17 July 2026]
18 September 2026
SAHMS is seeking individual paper and panel abstracts for its 2026 virtual student conference. We welcome submissions from graduate students, medical students, and others pursuing postgraduate education. Submissions can address topics related to the historical understanding of science and medicine, as well as closely related topics. Papers concerning all historical periods and global perspectives are encouraged.
Submissions for individual papers can be made online via Google Forms.
The deadline for submissions is Friday, July 17, 2026.
The Program Committee will notify you as to whether your paper is accepted no later than August 1, 2026. All participants and attendees are responsible for paying conference registration fees.
The Difficulty of Empathy: Rethinking the Literary Arts and Healthcare [CFPs deadline 23 July 2026]
10AM-4PM (UK time), Tuesday 23 September 2026, online symposium
University of Leicester & University of Glasgow
A society that insists on receiving ethical and political yields from the recreational reading of its citizens puts too great a burden on both empathy and the novel.
Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (OUP, 2007), p. 168.
Suzanne Keen’s observation about the difficulty of empathy is both a warning and a provocation. Claims about literature’s capacity to cultivate empathy have become commonplace across literary studies, narrative medicine, healthcare education, and the medical humanities. Yet the concept itself remains surprisingly difficult: variously understood as a cognitive skill, an affective response, a moral disposition, a professional competency, or a culturally specific mode of relating to others. At the same time, the relationship between reading and empathy continues to generate debate. What, precisely, happens when a reader encounters a literary text? How does this compare to what occurs when a clinician encounters a patient? What forms of attention, interpretation, and understanding are at stake in each case?
This online symposium aims to bring together researchers, practitioners and early-career scholars working at the intersection of literary studies, medical humanities, healthcare, and related disciplines to think about what literary approaches and contemporary clinical practice have to say to one another. We take as our starting point the conviction that empathy is a genuinely difficult concept, one which seems well-worn and yet remains contested and culturally specific. Rather than assuming empathy as a straightforward good or measurable outcome, we invite participants to explore its ambiguities, limits, and possibilities.
We invite proposals for 15-minute provocations that challenge listeners to think differently about empathy, healthcare, and the literary arts. The symposium is designed around discussion, discovery, and intellectual risk-taking rather than the presentation of completed findings. We therefore encourage contributors to frame their interventions through questions, tensions, paradoxes, or challenges that might open up new avenues for conversation and collaboration.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- The history of empathy in literature and/or healthcare
- Literary representations of care, illness, disability, and suffering
- Empathy and its limits in clinical practice
- Critiques of empathy in literary studies, philosophy, and healthcare
- Narrative medicine and its discontents
- Reading as embodied, affective, or ethical practice
- Cross-cultural understandings of empathy
- Interpretation, misunderstanding, uncertainty
- The relationship between empathy, sympathy, compassion, and care
- Reading, writing, and medical education
- Empathy, AI, and emerging technologies in healthcare
- Alternative models of relationality beyond empathy
Submission information
Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to Dr. Madeleine Chalmers (Madeleine.Chalmers@glasgow.ac.uk).
The deadline for submissions is 5PM (UK time) on 23 July 2026.
Flash presentations
We also welcome proposals from final-year undergraduates and postgraduate students for flash presentations of ongoing research related to these topics. These presentations should last no longer than five minutes and be accompanied by a single PowerPoint slide.
Please email Dr. Madeleine Chalmers (Madeleine.Chalmers@glasgow.ac.uk)to express interest.
About the project
This symposium is part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Empathy, Difficulty, Difference: Creative Curiosity in Practice’ led by Dr. Felicity James (University of Leicester). This project critically responds to urgent concerns about the erosion of empathy within health systems – and makes the case for the literary arts as a means to help healthcare practitioners and teams.
If you wish to share your CFPs on the SSHM website please contact the Exec Sec, Dr Justine Pick admin@sshm.org