John Keats: Poet-Physician, Physician-Poet,
1815-1821
A Bicentenary Conference at Guy’s
Hospital, London,
Organized by The Keats Foundation
(Registered Charity Number 1147589)
Guest of Honour: Professor Stuart Curran
Programme
Friday 1 May.
1 pm: Conference rooms open.
2 pm: Welcome and Orientation.
2. 30 pm: Stuart Curran (University of Pennsylvania): ‘“The feel of not to feel
it”: the Life of Non-Sensation in Keats’
3. 30 pm: Tea
4 pm-5.15 pm: Panel 1: John Keats at Guy’s Hospital
Nicholas Roe (University of St Andrews): ‘Mr. Keats, one of the Surgeons’
John Barnard (Leeds University): ‘Keats in the Context of the Physical Society, Guy’s
Hospital, 1815-16’
James Allard (Brock University, Ontario): ‘Bureaucracy, Pedagogy, Surgery: Keats,
Guy’s, and the “Institution” of Medicine’
5.15-5.30 pm: Break
5. 30 pm: Druin Burch (John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford): ‘The Romance of
Vivisection’
6. 45 pm: Reception at the Old Operating Theatre Museum
Saturday 2 May.
9 am: Damian Walford Davies (Cardiff University): ‘Keats’s Killing Breath’.
10.00 am: Panel 2: Poetics
David Miller (Manchester Metropolitan University): ‘“When this warm scribe my
hand is in the grave”: Keats’s Poetics of Absolute Dismemberment’
Michael O’Neill (Durham University): ‘“A more peaceable and healthy spirit”:
Keats’s Versification in the Odes’
Magdalena Ostas (Boston University): ‘The Physiology of Invisibility: Keats and the
Poetic Grammar of Self-Dissipation’
11. 15 am: Coffee
11. 45 am: Panel 3: Keats’s Careers (Room 1)
Greg Kucich (Notre Dame University): ‘Otho the Great and Keats's Re-Staging of
History’
Kenneth Page (Keats House, Hampstead): ‘Two Notes from Keats House: Little
Keats’s Travels in the Highlands; John Hamilton Reynolds’s copy of Wordsworth’s
Lyrical Ballads (1805)’
Angus Graham-Campbell (Eton College): ‘Keats and Kotzebue’s “The Stranger”’
Panel 4: Medicinal Types (Room 2)
Li Ou (The Chinese University of Hong Kong): ‘Keats, Sextus Empiricus, and
Medicine’
Nikki Hessell (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand): ‘John Keats and
Indian Medicine’
Matthew Ward (University of St Andrews): ‘Could laughter be the best medicine for
John Keats?’
1 pm: Lunch
2 pm: Jenny Uglow: ‘The Rollercoaster Years: Elba to Waterloo’
3 pm: Panel 5: Physican Poets (Room 1)
Carly Stevenson (University of Sheffield): ‘“That paleness warms my grave”: Keats’s
Poetics of Vitality’
Mark Sandy (Durham University): ‘“Living here and Breathing”: Keats, Healthy
Legacies, and Poetic Bowers’
Kathy Nixon (American University of Kuwait): ‘Medicinal Plants in the Bower:
Examining “I stood tip-toe” and “Sleep and Poetry”’
Panel 6: Conceptions of Keats (Room 2)
Meiko O’Halloran (Newcastle University): ‘“Physician to all Men”: Keats and
Romantic Conceptualisations of the Poet’
Megan Coyer (University of Glasgow): ‘“Why are Professional Men Indifferent
Poets?”: John Keats and the Construction of the Physician-Poet in Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine’
Christine Kenyon Jones (King’s College London): ‘“The Onanism of Poetry”:
Byron’s Consumptive Metaphors of Keats’
4. 15 pm: Tea
4. 45 pm: Panel 7: Imagination
Madeleine Callaghan (University of Sheffield): ‘“You must allow for Imagination”:
Shifting States of Mind in the Letters of John Keats’
Anthony Howe (Birmingham City University): ‘“Rejoicing for his many pains” Keats
and the Healthy Imagination’
Ben P. Robertson (Troy University): ‘Keats, Lamia, and Impossible Images’
6 pm: Panel 8: Keatsian Resurrections (Room 1)
Rico Brown (Independent Scholar): ‘Does the “Foetal Alcohol Effect” explain
Keats’s Tempestuous Moods’?
Chiara Moriconi (La Sapienza Università di Roma): ‘“At last they felt the kernel of
the grave”: Romance Resurrected in Keats’s Narrative Poems’
Emma Suret (University of Sheffield): ‘“A wound that bleeds afresh”: Owen’s
Response to Keats’s Masochistic Poetics’
Panel 9: Melancholias (Room 2)
David Lo Ka Tat (The Chinese University of Hong Kong): ‘Keats’s Re-reading of
Melancholy’
Peter Phillips (Independent Scholar) ‘“Anoint the soles of the feet with the fat of a
dormouse”: pre-Prozac remedies for Melancholy’
Stephanie Churms (Aberystwyth University): ‘My lady fair the conjurer plays’: Keats
and Living Cultures of the Occult
8. 00 pm: Reception at the George Inn, Southwark High Street
Sunday 3 May.
9.15 am: Panel 10: Contemporaries (Room 1)
Catherine Boyle and Phil Vellender (London South Bank University): ‘The unveiling
of health: landscape, sickness and health in the poetry of John Keats and Leigh Hunt’
Lyndsey Skinner (Northumbria University): ‘The “Fleeting Darling Poets”: John
Keats, John Hamilton Reynolds and the scum of men and magazines’
John Goodridge (Nottingham Trent University): ‘Clare and Keats on Sickness and
Health: “Just a few Beats of the Heart”’
Panel 11: Modern Keats (Room 2)
Satyaranjan Das (Moyna College, West Bengal): ‘Keats’s Poetry: The Dream to
Transcend the World of Suffering and Decay’
Christina A. Valeo and Jonathan Johnson (Eastern Washington University): ‘Keats as
Caregiver and Patient in the New Play Ode: Telling and Teaching the Story of “Soulmaking” through the Poet’s Medical Milestones’
Elizabeth Dunham (Eastern Washington University): ‘The Understanding and
Appropriating of Sensation: From the Physical Experience to the Poetry of John Keats’
10. 15 am: Coffee
10. 45 am: Bob White (University of Western Australia): ‘Keats, Mourning and
Melancholia’
11. 45 am: Panel 12: Reading Keats
Jonathan Mulrooney (College of the Holy Cross): ‘What Keats Heals’
Hrileena Ghosh (University of St Andrews): ‘Endymion and the Physiology of
Passion’
Stacey McDowell (St. John’s College, Cambridge): ‘Reading Touch’
1 pm: Lunch
2 pm: Jeffrey Cox (University of Colorado at Boulder): ‘Young Men on the
Make: Keats and the Cockney Profession of Poetry’
3pm: Final Panel: Later Keats
Paul Whickman (University of Derby): ‘“A Joy Forever”: The Paradoxes of
Transience and Temporality in the Poetry of John Keats’
Daniel Westwood (University of Sheffield): ‘“Shadowy Thought”: Hallucination and
“things semi-real” in Ode to Psyche’
Gregory Tate (University of Surrey): ‘Medicine, Sympathy, and Myth in Ode to
Psyche’
4. 45 pm: Tea and a Final Discussion
We thank the following publishers for supporting this
Conference
The Keats Foundation
The Keats Foundation is a Registered Charity (No. 1147589) that exists
to encourage enjoyment and understanding of Keats’s poems, letters,
life and times and to inspire new generations of young poets to fulfil their
creative ambitions. We support educational initiatives based at Keats
House, and more widely at festivals, readings, conferences and other
Keats-related events. For our latest activities, please see the News pages
on the Keats Foundation website http://keatsfoundation.com
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