Imaginations of the Womb – Uterine Imaginaries

This two-day event fosters graduate-led research and discussions in the humanities on the ethical, symbolic, and cultural meanings of the womb across traditions and epochs. The womb has long been a site where competing values around autonomy, gender, sexuality, and power converge. Participants will explore how womb-related knowledge—spanning literature, philosophy, the history of medicine, religion, art, music, and law—shapes understandings of personhood, agency, and moral authority. At its core, the workshop undertakes a sustained inquiry into how human societies have imagined reproduction and human difference. The workshop features a variety of formats, including graduate student research presentations, roundtables, and a keynote lecture by Professor Terri Kapsalis (School of the Art Institute of Chicago).

Terri Kapsalis is the author of Jane Addams’ Travel Medicine Kit (commissioned by the Hull-House Museum, a collaboration with forensic scientists, installed in Jane Addams’ bedroom as an alternative label alongside her kit for a “slow museum” experience), Hysterical Alphabet (WhiteWalls, based on primary medical writings on hysteria from ancient Egypt to the present and written like a Victorian children’s alphabet book, also a multi-media performance with film and live soundtrack performed with John Corbett and Danny Thompson throughout the U.S.), and Public Privates:  Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Duke University Press – the only book reviewed in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Village Voice, and a medical fetishist site The Amateur Gynecologist.)

This workshop is open to the public and to all Princeton graduate and undergraduate students regardless of identity.