Evidencing Life and Death in the Medical Humanities: DPhil and Early Career Workshop
Medical Humanities Blog Post
Medical Humanities Blog Post
Evidencing Life and Death in the Medical Humanities: DPhil and Early Career Workshop
June 20-21 2025
The interdisciplinary workshop, 'Evidencing Life and Death in the Medical Humanities', was held in the History Faculty on June 20-21 2025. The one-and-a-half-day event was organized by postdoctoral researcher Yuxin Peng and DPhil candidates Eleanor Kerfoot and Hande Altinay for DPhils and ECRs working in the medical humanities in Oxford. Participants came together around the theme of life, death, health, and wellbeing with an eye to inspire interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration.
Thirteen DPhil students and early career researchers from the history of medicine, medical anthropology, literature, theology, international development, and psychiatry presented their working papers through four panels chaired by established researchers working on related topics. Papers ranged from explorations of the role of art, music and theological narratives in reframing contentious issues around life and death; the politics of contemporary tuberculosis control and vaccination campaigns against anthrax; and the historical and current use of statistics, data, and knowledge categories in framing and managing disease, post-mortem change, and health evaluations. The workshop also contained a poster session with MSc dissertation projects and marked its first day with a keynote lecture by Prof. Nükhet Varlık, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.
In her lecture, "The Precarious City: New Regimes of Death and Disease in Early Modern Istanbul" Prof. Varlık presented her ongoing research on changing regimes of death and disease in early modern Istanbul. Varlik argued that innovations in technology and the arrival of new substances from the New World to the Ottoman Empire transformed the way its inhabitants experienced disease, healing and death, ushering in a new regime of "healthscaping" closely tied to sovereignty in early modernity. The scholar's innovative engagement with primary material and textual sources to uncover the history of death and disease in this period, including tombstones in Istanbul’s historical graveyards and bioarcheological DNA evidence was an inspiring invitation for medical humanities researchers to explore new sources and pursue interdisciplinary work with scientists and archeologists.
The final session of the workshop brought together participants to discuss key takeaways. While particular disciplinary approaches framed our work, such as our diverse approach to questions of ethics in contemporary vs. historical work in the medical humanities, participants agreed that listening to the way others asked research questions, employed methodologies and dealt with the very “human” themes of life and death were deeply inspiring and fruitful. The group intends to make the workshop in Medical Humanities at Oxford a yearly event.
Yuxin Peng is a medical anthropologist. She works on community health and mental health in England.
Hande Altinay is a DPhil candidate working on medical and environmental history in the nineteenth-century Ottoman world.
Eleanor Kerfoot is a historian with a particular research interest in the relationship between medicine and attitudes towards death.
Yuxin Peng, Hande Altinay, Eleanor Kerfoot
