Effaced from history? The disfigured and their stories from antiquity to the present day

Two international workshops (in December 2015 and June 2016) will design and refine a long-term collaborative project to reconstruct the hidden histories of disfigured people from the Roman era to the modern day. The key goal is to establish a robust collaborative, interdisciplinary network of established scholars and new researchers, combining humanities scholars and medical practitioners.

The workshops will explore five key themes: 1) Documentation: Who was disfigured in the past? Collections and collations of accounts of and by disfigured people 2) Queering the face: reading texts from a disfigured perspective 3) Faking, fixing, facing up: strategies to ‘pass’, cosmetic interventions, surgery as and for disfigurement 4) Gazing and staring: the visual consumption of disfigured people, past and present 5) Changing places: documenting, deconstructing and defusing prejudice.