The Sigerist Circle invites proposals for papers from graduate students and early-career scholars to be delivered at our session on the afternoon of Thursday, April 26 at the 2012 Annual American Association for the History of Medicine meeting in Baltimore. Abstracts are invited for presentations addressing Leftist historiography of medicine. What does it mean to conduct Leftist history of medicine today? How has the history of medicine as a field been shaped by the incorporation of Marxist, feminist, subaltern, and other historical approaches which question dominant power structures? What is the current and future role for such approaches? What are the challenges of conducting Leftist history? What changing relationships have medical historians had with political activism, both as activists themselves and/or as interpreters of the history of the health left? How can the roles of activist and historian be understood today and in the future of the field? Submissions addressing these questions and others related to Leftist historiography of medicine are encouraged. The session will focus broadly on what it means to conduct Leftist history of medicine forty years after the New Social History impulse took hold and since the turn toward cultural history.

Those interested in submitting proposals should email an abstract (maximum 250 words) to: heidi.knoblauch@yale.edu by December 15th.

The Sigerist Circle is a group of medical historians, scholars in related fields and others interested in the history of health, health care and the biomedical sciences, who give special attention to the issues of class, race, and gender and /or use Marxist, feminist, and related critical methodologies in the analysis of medical history.

The Conference Organizing Committee Laura Bothwell, Jennifer Gunn, Heidi Knoblauch, and John Harley Warner