International Medical Humanities Conference 2025

The “Drinking Cultures” project team spoke at the International Conference on Medical Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, 7-8 March as part of a panel on “Literature, Shame and Social Contexts of Health.”

PI Lucy Cogan gave a paper looking at how literary folktales became a battleground in the cultural struggle over the meaning of lower-class male drinking in Ireland with a paper entitled, “Feeble-Minded or Heroic?: The Drunken Irish Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Literary Folk Tales.” 

Fionnula Simpson then spoke about a case study she is developing on the use of gendered shame within nineteenth-century Irish temperance literature, with “‘The Tears, the Rags’: Shame, Gender, and the Family in 19th-Century Irish Temperance Literature.”

Lastly, Katie Snow used the lens of the Bakhtinian “carnivalesque” to examine the divergence in attitudes towards drinking among high and low in her paper “Uproarious Bodies: Situating Drunkenness and Class in Nineteenth-Century Irish Literature.”