Faculty Research Forums are held in the Bingham Humanities Building, Room 300 and begin at 3:30 p.m. unless otherwise noted.

March 28, 2008
"Virginia Woolf Among Lunatics"
Presented by Suzette Henke, Department of English
Why have modern scholars so persistently analyzed Woolf's mental distress as virtually unique -- the affliction of a genius set apart from other men and women of the Victorian and Edwardian ages?  By examining case histories of women and men incarcerated in Britain's Holloway Sanatorium for the Insane, Professor Henke suggests analogies between Woolf's reported symptoms and those observed in patients admitted to institutional confinement at the turn of the century.  Lacking a category for post-traumatic stress disorder, Victorian and Edwardian physicians were prone to misdiagnose the condition of trauma survivors in terms of mania or depression - even in the cases where an obvious traumatic wound had precipitated mental crisis.  This paper explores ways in which case histories of both male and female patients at the Holloway Sanatorium bear uncanny resemblance to the psychiatric profile of Septimus Warren Smith, Woolf's projected alter ego in Mrs. Dalloway.  Smith and his creator, along with the inmates of Holloway, all manifest recognizable symptoms of  post-traumatic stress disorder that "mime" other psychiatric disorders.  Drawing on archival resources from the Wellcome Medical Library in London, as well as on holograph manuscripts in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, Professor Henke offers an analysis of Woolf's narrative reformulation of both personal and historical trauma through the aegis of scriptotherapy.

April 25, 2007
Topic and presenter TBA

Previous Faculty Research Forums

November 9, 2007
"Global Concerns through Local Moral Idioms: An African Perspective" Presented by Professor Dismas Masolo, Department of Philosophy
Click here to see a description of this presentation