'Bodies' - College of Arts and Humanities Postgraduate Conference 2026

Ferguson Room, University of Glasgow | 3rd June 2026 | 9am-5pm

Bodies define how we understand our world. They are the collective - our organiser and counter of objects, individuals, ideas, or phenomena. Yet our bodies are also the first means by which we understand our difference from the world; our existence as a separate entity. How can bodies act as sites of meaning-making, connection, or mis/understanding? How do we use bodies to define?

Welcome (9:00- 9:15)

Panel 1: The Body throughout History (9:15-10:45)

• Matthew Farren (University of the Highlands and Islands): EMERGENT BODIES: A cognitive model for understanding the body in Viking-Age legal customs

• Hope Moore (University of Glasgow): A game of thrones and eyeballs: blinding in the medieval Irish annals

• Roslyn Potter (University of Glasgow): Blood and wine: managing period pain in early modern Scotland

• Shujia Fan (University of Glasgow) Performing the Past: Embodied Historical Imagination in Contemporary Chinese Costume Drama

Coffee Break 1 (10:45-11:00)

Panel 2: Bodies in Performance and Space (11:00-12:15)

• Sourabh Phadke (University of Edinburgh): Bodies of Work: On Labour, Knowledge, and Architectural Practice

• Finn Townsley (University of Glasgow) : Chairs that hate you: How hostile design utilises discomfort to control public behaviours

• Emma Ettinger (University of Glasgow): ‘Court Her in My Borrowed Shape’: Bodily Difference, Desirability, and Dissembling in The Fair Maid of the Exchange and Cyrano de Bergerac

Keynote: Dr Gina Lyle, University of York: Where Bodies Become Meat in Contemporary Literature (12:15-13:15)

Lunch (13:15-14:10)

Panel 3: Gendered and Sexualised Bodies (14:10-15:40)

• Patrick Jamieson (University of Glasgow): ‘There shall mither naked mak you’: Eighteenth-Century Discipline and Initiation in ‘The Fornicators’ Court'

• Amritash Sankhyan (University of Glasgow): Policing the Visible Body: Prostitution, Gender, and Official Knowledge in Interwar Bombay

• Kate Kane (University of Glasgow): 'I am Scotland': Gendered Violence and the Nation in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literary Depictions of Mary, Queen of Scots

• Elle Nash (University of Glasgow): Charlene Elsby’s ‘Poor Damned Souls’: Violence as mirror and portal in Femgorefiction

Coffee Break 2 (15:40-16:00)

Panel 4: Mediated Bodies (16:00-16:50)

• Natascha Ewert (University of Glasgow): The Archetypal Self: Healing mind, body through creativity from a female perspective

• Rhoda Ellis (University of Dundee): All The Bodies That Once Were Mine

Closing Remarks (16:50-17:00)

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Host or Publisher University of Glasgow, College of Arts