CFP: Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities – VPFA Study Day

Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities

A VPFA Study Day

Loughborough University, 27 March 2026

The Health Humanities and Victorian popular fiction intersect in revealing ways, offering insights into how 19th-century literature shaped and reflected contemporary understandings of health, illness, and the body. Popular narratives not only mirrored anxieties surrounding public health and medical progress but also contributed to shaping public perceptions of health and healing. Health Humanities approaches re-examine these texts to uncover how cultural narratives and literary representations influenced attitudes toward physical and mental well-being, gendered experiences of illness, and the ethics of care in an age of rapid scientific change.

Health Humanities is a particularly useful approach to sensation fiction because it illuminates the ways in which these emotionally charged, often morally ambiguous narratives explore and interrogate concepts of the body, illness, and mental health. Sensation fiction, with its focus on secrets, trauma, nervous disorders, and abnormal psychological states, frequently dramatizes the anxieties of Victorian society surrounding health, gender, and identity. By applying the lens of Health Humanities, scholars can uncover how these texts reflect and shape contemporary medical discourse. Interdisciplinary approaches also highlight how sensation fiction critiques institutional medicine, domestic care practices, and the pathologization of women’s experiences. Ultimately, Health Humanities allows us to see sensation fiction not just as entertainment, but as a culturally significant form that negotiates the meanings of illness, morality, and human vulnerability in a rapidly changing world.

20-minute papers are invited on any aspect of the health humanities and sensation fiction. Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

• Madness, Hysteria, and the Sensation Heroine
• The Role of Doctors and Medical Authority in Sensation Novels
• Mental Illness and the Gothic: Psychological Trauma in Sensation Fiction
• Poison, Addiction, and the Victorian Body
• Insanity as Inheritance: Medical Anxieties and Family Secrets
• Disability, Disfigurement, and Moral Judgment in Sensation Narratives
• Contagion and Fear: Illness as a Metaphor
• Sleepwalking, Hypnosis, and Altered States in the Victorian Imagination
• The Medicalization of Women: Gender, Power, and Diagnosis
• Health, Class, and Medical Access
• Asylums, Institutions, and the Fear of Confinement
• Domestic Illness and the Unwell Home
• The Nervous System, Neuroscience, and Sensation Fiction
• Medical Ethics and the ‘Mad Scientist’
• Narratives of Recovery and the Idea of Cure in the sensation novel

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers as a Word or PDF attachment to a.m.beller@lboro.ac.uk by 31 December 2025.

Proposals should be a maximum of 250 words and accompanied by a short (70 words) biographical note.

This will be an in-person event and refreshments will be provided.

A limited number of travel bursaries are available for PhD students, independent scholars and unwaged participants.  If you would like to be considered for one of the bursaries, please email 

Dr Anne-Marie Beller on the email above.

This event is free, thanks to funding from the VPFA and the Health Humanities Research Group at Loughborough University.