Science and art are the very nature of human attempts to understand and describe the world around us. As COVID-19 continues to dominate public discourse across the world - its ongoing effects trickling into every facet of our lives - the relationship between our health and how it affects the way we move through society has never felt more prescient. The 31st issue of FORUM aims to explore what has been identified as ‘sickness’ in literature and art through the years. How have the body and mind been treated by writers, artists, and cultural commentators - in sickness and in health.
Artists and authors have long recognised the metaphorical potential for sickness and disease to comment upon social and political issues. Charles Dickens, for example, shows how disease transcends social hierarchies in his novel Bleak House. Another example is Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, who in her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper illustrates perfectly the attitude towards the mental and physical health of women in the late nineteenth century. More recently, Ken Currie’s haunting portrait Three Oncologists (2002) expresses the sense of horror and anxiety cancer continues to evoke. The relationship between art and sickness is not unilateral. Frieda Kahlo’s self-portraits often deal with her ailing body and she transmutes her body on canvas, with a vivid description of her medical history. Similarly, medical illustration and phrenological heads were used to help physicians puzzle out the mysteries of the human mind and body, while Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings are considered some of the most significant achievements of Renaissance science. Art therapy - a form of psychotherapy - uses art media as its main mode of expression and communication. There are multiple examples of sickness, disease, disability, (mis)diagnosis that pervades art - the body, especially those which are marked as ‘deviant’, ‘non-conforming’, ‘foreign’ and the psyche, which has been prodded and probed to solve universal questions of identity, human rationale and behaviour, has been continuously explored by authors, poets, artists and philosophers alike.
For issue 31 of FORUM, we seek submissions from a range of disciplines which engage with concepts of sickness and health. We encourage interdisciplinary papers that converge scientific and artistic discourses and look forward to papers that look at our current circumstance as well as literature as a child of multidisciplinary discourse. Submissions may relate, but are not limited to:
● Material Culture, the language of disease
● Mind and body
● Isolation and exposure
● The ethics of treatment: transgression as sickness, oppression as cure
● Holism, homoeopathy, self-care, physical, spiritual, and mental health
● Quackery
● Contagion, contamination, and quarantine
● Art therapy
● The tortured artist
Papers must be between 3,000 – 5,000 words in length, formatted according to MLA guidelines. FORUM is also considering academic book reviews (1,000 words) and multimedia and alternative presentations for publication. Please email your article, a short abstract and your academic CV in separate, clearly labelled DOC(X). files to by 30th November 2020. All eligible articles will be peer-reviewed prior to publication. Only one submission per author per issue is permitted.
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The 30th issue of FORUM invites articles and book reviews that look at Creative Resistance and how it emerges in different forms, in different cultures.
Read more about CfP Issue 30: Creative Resistance - deadline extended till April 20thThe 30th issue of FORUM invites articles and book reviews that look at Creative Resistance and how it emerges in different forms, in different cultures.
Read more about CfP Issue 30: Creative Resistance
FORUM Postgraduate Journal Call for Papers, Issue 29 (2019): Co-Creation and Collaboration
Art forms such as opera, theatre and dance routinely remind us of the power of ensemble performance, but examples of collaborative practice can also be found in fields more usually associated with solo activity. Artists’ colonies and shared studios fostered close working relationships between painters such as Picasso and Braque, and Gilbert & George have spent their whole working lives as a collaborative duo. In poetry, the Japanese renga form is a structured but improvised collaboration; Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads marked a notable attempt at a joint venture; Eliot’s The Waste Land was transformed by Pound’s editorial input. Current academic research often foregrounds interdisciplinary approaches, while theories of intertextuality emphasise the interconnectivity of different works and the reader’s interpretive role in a text’s meaning.
But artistic dialogues can also be combative and provocative, as in medieval flyting, the Dozens, and rap battles. Drawing on the works of others may result in appropriation, pastiche, parody or plagiarism. Historically, collaboration can be problematic or even dangerous: during wartime it became a dirty word, the opposite of resistance. In our increasingly polarised ideological landscape, is political compromise achievable, or even desirable?
For issue 29 of FORUM we seek submissions from a range of disciplines which engage with concepts of co-creation, collaboration, co-authorship and cooperation. Submissions may relate to, but are not limited to:
- Artistic partnerships, collectives and cooperatives
- Knowledge exchange in and between universities and learned societies
- Translation and adaptation
- Intertextuality
- Interdisciplinarity
- Ekphrasis
- Citation, allusion, palimpsests, sampling, satire, pastiche and parody
- Oral and folk traditions
- Open source publishing and online collaborations
FORUM is a peer-reviewed journal for postgraduate students working in culture and the arts. Authors must be current postgraduate students, or must have completed their postgraduate degree no more than three years ago. Formatted according to MLA guidelines, papers must be between 3000 and 5000 words in length, and book reviews around 1,250 words. FORUM also considers multimedia or alternative presentations for publication.
Please e-mail your article or book review, a short abstract, and your academic CV in separate, clearly labelled .doc(x) files to or submit online at forumjournal.org by 1 October, 2019. All eligible articles will be peer reviewed prior to publication. Only one submission per author per issue is permitted.
Read more about CfP Issue 29: Co-creation and collaborationFORUM Call for Papers, Issue 28 (2019): Walls
Schott, Lorelei. Walls or Gates?. 2018.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, it seems apropos to speak of walls. Yes, walls. In the current political climate, walls divide and separate. They draw the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In everyday life, they delineate and create the spaces we inhabit. Yet, these divisions are not always necessarily physical. In mainland China, for example, the Great Firewall restricts access to the internet. Abroad we might find it difficult to communicate because of the language barrier. In effect, it seems that walls stand between us and others, between us and the outside world.
In art and literature, however, walls sometimes come to stand for something else. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” they come to criticize and denounce the rest cure and the patriarchy. In Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” they are the springboard for philosophical meditations. Whereas, in Finnegans Wake, Humpty Dumpty’s fall is in many ways the catalyst for James Joyce’s archetypal, kaleidoscopic, polyphonic, multilingual, and cyclical rewriting of history. In visual art, walls become the medium. With the application of paint or of plaster, walls are turned into murals and frescoes. In Mexico, for example, the politically charged murals of Los Tres Grandes unified people in the aftermath of the revolution. Despite appearing mundane and uninspiring, walls have symbolic value in political, religious, cultural, and artistic spheres.
In this issue of FORUM we seek and encourage contributions which engage with the concept of walls in its largest expression. We invite you to think about physical walls, psychological hurdles, and invisible barriers, whether they separate and divide or bring people together.
Papers must be between 3000 to 5000 words in length, formatted according to MLA guidelines.
FORUM is also considering academic book reviews (1,250 words) and multimedia or alternative presentations for publication.
Please e-mail your article, a short abstract, and your academic CV in separate, clearly labelled .doc(x) files to or submit through the website by 15 February, 2019. All eligible articles will be peer reviewed prior to publication. Only one submission per author per issue is permitted.
Read more about CfP Issue 28: WallsFORUM Call for Papers, Issue 27 (2018): The Gaze
Mary Cassatt, ‘In the Loge’ (1878)
The gaze is essential to the ownership and interpretation of art. Even as the woman in Cassatt’s ‘In the Loge’ gazes at the action onstage, she herself is being observed by the man in the background. In The London Review of Books, Julian Barnes writes: ‘It’s as if he’s telling her: don’t forget that the male gaze rules here, my good woman.’ From Jane Austen to #metoo, the recognition and subversion of the dominant gaze has repeatedly shed new light on cultural hierarchies.
Issue 27 of FORUM seeks contributions from a wide range of disciplines concerning the gaze, recognition, and identification. All aspects of culture and identity can be said to be subject to a form of the gaze - how does an art form interact with its audience? How does the presence of the gaze affect the ownership of a medium? How is the gaze redirected in subversive art? Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
Papers must be between 3,000 – 5,000 words in length, formatted according to MLA guidelines.
FORUM is also considering academic book reviews (1,000 words) and multimedia or alternative presentations for publication.
Please e-mail your article, a short abstract, and your academic CV in separate, clearly labelled .doc(x) files to by 11 September, 2018. All eligible articles will be peer reviewed prior to publication. Only one submission per author per issue is permitted.
Read more about CfP Issue 27: The Gaze
Postgraduates at the University of Edinburgh is seeking papers for the Latest Learning Colloquy.
A number of papers by colloquy participants will be selected for publication in a special issue of FORUM.
Read more about What's new in LLC?A big thank-you to all our delegates and academic guests who joined us last month for ReVision: Editing Across Disciplines.
We hope everyone enjoyed the conference and took away something useful: according to our feedback forms (thanks to all who filled in!) it seems that the workshops were particularly interesting, as was the diverse range of disciplines gathered together on various panels. We were glad to hear you all felt relaxed and enjoyed the friendly feedback and peer support the delegates at the conference provided, whilst managing to ensure all papers were professional and up to date. You can check out the pictures and download a copy of the programme here!
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