Call for papers for the third annual conference of the Women Historians’ Forum
Researching women in the Middle East
Historical perspectives on health and gender
Online – Tuesday, July 6, 2021
The Women Historians’ Forum at the Haifa Feminist Research Center — Isha I’Isha, in collaboration with the “Regional History of Medicine in the Middle East” research project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Nehemiah Levtzion Center for Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Herzog Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Diplomacy at Ben Gurion University of the Negey, invites researchers to participate in the Women Historians’ Forum’s annual conference on Researching women in the Middle East.
This year, the conference will focus on the history of health and gender in the Middle East. It seeks to present diverse historical perspectives concerning the interrelationships between gendered bodies and medical knowledge: between the material body and the medical establishment, and between various gendered subjects and perceptions of health and gender. We are interested in struggles for change, alongside competing efforts to preserve existing practices and understandings of historical transformations of perceptions of health, gender, and intersectional identities. Conference papers will examine varied sources: medical, ethnographical, or literary writing; oral history; state and colonial archives, and more. We will delve into the region of the Middle East in its broadest definition, to include Turkey, North Africa, and Iran.
We invite historians, as well as researchers from adjacent disciplines, to submit proposals for papers or sessions that examine topics relevant to these themes and objectives. Possible topics include:
- Women in the medical professions
- Women’s health and gynecology
- Gender and medical knowledge
- The gendered body in health and in sickness
- Contraceptives, abortion, and childbirth
- Public health in its gendered contexts
- Artistic and literary representations of gender and health
- Women, health, and citizenship
- Gendered spaces and health
- Medicine and gender-based violence
To submit a paper proposal, in English, Arabic, or Hebrew, send contact information and an abstract of up to 300 words. For a session, please submit all paper abstracts and a 300-word session abstract with the names of the organizers.
Abstracts should be sent by May 1, 2021, to womenhistoriansforum@gmail.com
The Women Historians’ Forum was founded in 2017 at the Haifa Feminist Research Center – Isha I’Isha, as a group of social and cultural historians of the Middle East and Palestine /Israel in the 19th and 20th centuries.