CFP: Changing Bodies and Subjects in Early Modernity (RSA 2025)

Proposals for 20-minute presentations that explore how changes in bodily states, life stages, and other changes in embodiment affected people, their self-image, their subject positions, etc. in the early modern period. “Body” can be understood in the strict physical sense or in the developmental sense as a process and as an evolving entity or phenomenon, including behaviour, learned abilities and habits. Examples of changes and states include but are not limited to growth, ageing and ailing, pregnancy, gender transitioning, disabilities, wounds and diseases, the learning of new abilities or the loss of previously acquired ones, etc. Approaches from literature, history , gender and cultural studies, religion, medicine and sciences, all forms of art, and others are welcome.
Email a 150-word proposal by August 1 to Enrique_Fernandez@umanitoba.ca