Special Issue of Literature and Medicine
Health and Human Rights
Volume 25, Number 1
Issue Editor: Priscilla Wald

We are interested in essays that explore the intersection of health and human rights. What questions are currently being asked at that juncture, and how and why might we ask them through the study of literature (broadly conceived)? We welcome essays that consider narratives about health and human rights as well as the narratives that structure the concepts of health and human rights. Essays might explore why certain stories have dominated the field (for example, narratives of heroism and/or atrocities) and with what effect? What other stories could be told and what might be the outcome of those retellings? We would welcome essays that take a literary critical or cultural analytic approach to non-literary texts, exploring the language and images through which the concepts of health and human rights are currently imagined. We are especially interested in essays with a concentration on global health and the discourse of human rights and on questions of justice and access. This special issue is motivated by our sense that, in significant ways, health and human rights are reconstituting each other, and we believe that a study of this dynamic could yield important insight into contemporary understanding (and deployment) of both terms.

Deadline for submission: 1 June 2005

Manuscripts should be mailed to the address below and sent as an attachment to the e-mail address below. Text and notes should be double-spaced and prepared according to guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. The manuscript should be accompanied by the author’s curriculum vitae. Literature and Medicine is a peer-reviewed journal. Authors’ names should appear only on a cover sheet and all identifiers in the text should be masked so that manuscripts can be reviewed anonymously. Manuscripts should be between 4,000 and 7,000 words of text in length. Literature and Medicine reviews only unpublished manuscripts that are not simultaneously under review for publication elsewhere. Direct all inquiries and manuscripts to:

pwald@duke.edu

Send paper copies of manuscripts to:

Rita Charon and Maura Spiegel, Editors-in-Chief,
Literature and Medicine,
Program in Narrative Medicine,
College of P & S, Columbia University,
630 West 168th Street, PH9E—105,
New York, NY 10032