Thursday, November 20, 2025

Location for panels on Thursday 11.20.25: Rocky/Mathey Theater, Rockefeller College

9:00 - 9:15 | Opening Remarks by the Workshop Organizers
Marie-Louise James & Erica Passoni (Princeton University, German)

9:15 - 10:45 | Research Presentations Panel I:

Medical Practices & Archival Thresholds

panel chair: Nora Stumpfögger (Princeton University, German)

Helen Ruger (Princeton University, Classics): “An Unrelated Body: Representations of the Uterus in Ancient Greek Healing Practices”

Disha Ray (Princeton University, History): “Treating the Womb: Abortion in Hindi Medical Texts in Colonial India”

Niara Foster (Yale University, American Studies & African and American Studies): “On Account of Their Ignorance: Race, Reproduction, and the Unknown”

11:00 - 12:30 | Research Presentations Panel II:

(Para)psychoanalytic Recursions 

panel chair: Fabia Weisser (Princeton University, German)

Beatrice Fiducia (University of Iceland, English): “Julian of Norwich’s Matrixial Borderspaces: The Image of the Womb in A Book of Showings”

Abigail Kromminga (Yale University, History): “Holding Eros and Thanatos in the Womb: Early Psychoanalytic Approaches to the Death Drive”

Orestis Tzirtzilakis (Oxford University, Medieval & Modern Languages): “The Womb as a Symptom: Hysteria in Hélène Cixous and Gilles Deleuze”

13:30 - 15:00 | Research Presentations Panel III:

Political Reproductions & Sites of Power 

panel chair: Xiaoyao Guo (Princeton University, German)

Udeepta Chakravarty (New School for Social Research, Sociology): “The Revolutionary Womb”

Sneha Chakraborty (Idaho State University, English): “Wombs of Resistance: Transcultural Narratives of Sexuality, Trauma, and Reproductive Control"

Makayla Meyers (American Public University, History): “Wars and Wombs: Motherhood, Propaganda, and Biopolitical Control in Nazi Germany”

15:15 - 16:15 | Research Presentations Panel IV:

Poetics & Translation: Invocations of the Sacred 

panel chair: Zeytun West (Princeton University, German)

Desiree McCray (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary/Prairie State College, Creative Writing & Public Theology/English): “We Need A God Who Bleeds: Menstrual Divinity and the Black Womb as Holy Disruption”
Mollika Jai Singh (Indiana University Bloomington, Creative Writing/English): “‘This Womb of Every Being’: The Womb in Recent English Bhagavad Gita Translations as Universe and Location of Rebirth”

16:30 - 18:00 |Keynote Lecture: 

“Hysteria, Witches, and the Wandering Uterus, Revisited”

Terri Kapsalis (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Visual and Critical Studies)

moderator: Erica Passoni (Princeton University, German)

Location: McCosh Lecture Hall 46

Friday, November 21, 2025

Location for roundtables on Friday 11.21.25: Chancellor Green 103

9:00 - 10:15 | Roundtable I:

The Uterus in Motion: Premodern Perspectives

panel chair: Friederike Ach (Princeton University, Comparative Literature)

Emma McCabe (University of Stirling & University of Glasgow, Philosophy, Religion, & Literature): 

“Between Scylla and Charybdis: Aqueous and Uterine Imaginaries of the Early Modern Theatre in the Writings of Stephen Gosson”    

Tom Francis (University of California, Classics): “The Wandering Whom? Medical and Mystical Displacement of the Womb in Apuleius’ Galli Account”    

Lydia Shahan (Harvard University, Religion): “‘In her interior ground:’ Reconceiving Spiritual Birth in Sixteenth-Century Middle Dutch Mystical Literature”  

11:00 - 12:30 | Roundtable II:

Reproductive Modernities: Somatic Memories & Politics

panel chair: Marie-Louise James (Princeton University, German)

Adam Koehler Brown (New School for Social Research, Sociology): “The Temporal Politics of Birth in Arendt, Badiou, and Nelson”    

Amber Anseeuw (Ghent University, English): “‘A Wild, Ear-Piercing Scream:’ Monstrous Motherhood and Uterine Imaginaries in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”

 Lea Eisenstein (Princeton University, History): “The Birth of Hysterectomy and the Rise of the Removable Uterus”

Emily Wood (University of Waterloo, History): “Embodied Memories: Post-War Pregnancy and Childbirth in Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies”  

Our roundtable format is based on precirculated papers. Please email workshop organizers for further information.