Ekaterina Oleshkevich, Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała, and Anna Kałużna; Department of Jewish Studies, Wrocław Univ. (Web)
Time: 06.-08.07.2026
Venue: Department of Jewish Studies, Wrocław Univ.
Proposals by: 15.01.2026
From the rise of industry to the emergence of racial science and eugenics, from the expansion of empires to the contestation of class, gender, and disability norms—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a profound transformation in the ways bodies were perceived, categorized, and regulated. This transformation was driven by the increasing entanglement of state power, medical knowledge, and culture in the definition of bodily norms and the disciplining of deviant bodies. Scientific discourses strove to codify human difference, often along biological or racial lines; social institutions—from schools and hospitals to asylums and prisons—intervened in the everyday lives of the young, the poor, the sick, and the deviant; and both popular and elite, textual and visual cultures became invested in delineating the “fit” and “unfit,” the “civilized” and the “primitive,” the “normal” and the “abnormal.”
This conference seeks to explore how marginalized and minority bodies were imagined, categorized, and governed in Europe between 1850 and 1939, as well as how individuals and communities experienced, performed, and contested these regimes of representation and control. We welcome papers that address a broad range of minorities—including ethnic, religious, gender, class, age, sexual, and disabled communities—but we place particular emphasis on the Jewish body as a key site of modern European anxieties, fantasies, and negotiations. We are also interested in exploring diversity within Jewish society itself, including the experiences of Jewish women, children, the poor, migrants, or religious and cultural sub-groups who were subject to multiple layers of marginalization.
Topics may include (but are not limited to):
– Visual and scientific representations of Jewish and other minority bodies—by the minorities themselves or through dominant discourses
– Minority and marginalized bodies in institutional settings: prisons, asylums, schools, hospitals, poorhouses
– Gendered and queer embodiments Continue reading
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