Dissecting the Visceral Body, Across Time and Disciplines

VENUE CHANGE: Please note this event will now take place in Macmillan Hall, Senate House - click here to view a map. 

This one day conference will focus on the visceral body and its historical understanding across disciplines. In particular, we will be addressing how historical and cultural perspectives, scientific investigations and representations in arts have motivated key questions about the role that the visceral body plays in the quest to understand human condition. This interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective is motivated by a renewed focus on the viscera and emotions across humanities, a surge of scientific interest across psychological sciences and neurosciences on interoception (i.e. the perception of internal visceral signals) and on the long-standing importance of the body and its passions in arts.

Film Screening: The event will conclude with the screening of the short film “A Hunger Artist”, (2017, HD film, 16 minutes) by artist and academic Prof Daria Martin followed by a panel discussion, chaired by Dr Noga Arikha,  between the artist and Dr Katerina Fotopoulou (UCL) and Dr Jenny Chamarette (Queen Mary). A Hunger Artist, (2017) adapts Franz Kafka’s 1922 modernist short story of the same name: a strange allegory about spectacle, spectators, power and narcissism. 

Organizers :Prof Manos Tsakiris (The Warburg Institute & Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Fay Bound Alberti

Speakers: Speakers: Dr  Fay Bound Alberti (UK), Dr Helena de Preester (University of Ghent), Dr Jack Hartnell, (University of East Anglia), Prof Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford University), Prof Jane Macnaughton (Durham University),  Prof Sarah Garfinkel  (University of Sussex), Prof Manos Tsakiris (The Warburg Institute)

Panelists: Prof Daria Martin (Oxford), Dr Katerina Fotopoulou (UCL), Dr Jenny Chamarette (Queen Mary)

Programme:

Photo credit: 19th-century anatomical model from the collection of George Loudon. 

Photo by Rosamond Purcell.