Literature and Medicine
Conferences and Calls for Papers

• Health and Human Rights
• General Issue

A Special Issue of Literature and Medicine - Health and Human Rights

Issue Editor: Priscilla Wald
Deadline for submission: June 1, 2006

We are interested in essays that explore the intersection of health and human rights. What questions are currently being asked at that juncture, and how and why might we ask them through the study of literature (broadly conceived)? We welcome essays that consider narratives about health and human rights as well as the narratives that structure the concepts of health and human rights. Essays might explore why certain stories have dominated the field (for example, narratives of heroism and/or atrocities) and with what effect? What other stories could be told and what might be the outcome of those retellings? We would welcome essays that take a literary critical or cultural analytic approach to non-literary texts, exploring the language and images through which the concepts of health and human rights are currently imagined. We are especially interested in essays with a concentration on global health and the discourse of human rights and on questions of justice and access. This special issue is motivated by our sense that, in significant ways, health and human rights are reconstituting each other, and we believe that a study of this dynamic could yield important insight into contemporary understanding (and deployment) of both terms.

Manuscripts should be mailed to the address below and sent as an attachment to the e-mail address below. Text and notes should be double-spaced and prepared according to guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. The manuscript should be accompanied by a cover letter. Literature and Medicine is a peer-reviewed journal. Authors' names should appear only on a cover letter and all identifiers in the text should be masked so that manuscripts can be reviewed anonymously. Manuscripts should be between 4,000 and 7,000 words of text in length. Literature and Medicine reviews only unpublished manuscripts that are not simultaneously under review for publication elsewhere.

Direct all inquiries and manuscripts to: pwald@duke.edu

Send paper copies of manuscript to:

Rita Charon & Maura Spiegel, Editors-in-Chief
Literature and Medicine
Program in Narrative Medicine,
College of P&S, Columbia University,
630 West 168th Street, PH9E--Room 105,
New York, NY 10032

General Issue

Literature and Medicine is published semiannually. The first issue of each year is a thematic one; the second issue is a general one, with no special theme. Submissions on any aspect of literature and medicine will be considered, but the journal rarely publishes short notes, personal essays, fiction, or poetry in the general issue. Authors are advised to look at past issues of the journal before submitting their work. Manuscripts should be between 4,000 and 7,000 words of text in length, or twenty-five to thirty-five pages inclusive of double-spaced notes.

Completed essays, should be sent to:

Rita Charon and Maura Spiegel, Editors-in-Chief
Literature and Medicine
Program in Narrative Medicine
Columbia University
630 West 168th Street
PH 9-East, Room 105
New York, NY 10032

All manuscripts should be submitted in triplicate, with text and notes typewritten and double-spaced, and prepared according to guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition. Literature and Medicine is a peer-reviewed journal. Authors' names should appear only on a cover sheet and any identifiers in the text should be masked so that manuscripts can be reviewed anonymously. Literature and Medicine reviews only unpublished manuscripts that are not simultaneously under review for publication elsewhere.