IUPUC faculty member Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, Ph.D., recently presented at the Trauma: Intersections among Narrative, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis Conference in Washington, D.C.

Goodspeed-Chadwick’s presentation, “‘This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary’: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and the Socio-Cultural and Medico-Political Implications of Trauma and Narrative,” was part of  a panel on “Limits in Trauma Theory” with presenters from Columbia University and University of California, Berkeley.

“In my presentation, I illustrated how the suffering female mind and body combination or duality is the locus of cultural concerns and social problems pertaining to gender,” Goodspeed-Chadwick said. “In considering Sylvia Plath’s shaping of trauma and our ability to interpret her work within the concerns of contemporary trauma studies and relevant research, we become cognizant of what is at stake in theories about trauma, and we begin to validate literature that functions as a social document that disseminates and cultivates attitudes about trauma and establishes a narrative concerning trauma and the female body.”

The conference was sponsored by The George Washington University and was attended by scholars and clinicians in English, Sociology, Psychology, Social Work, Counseling Psychology and Neuroscience. The conference offered opportunities for interdisciplinary study and the sharing of ideas across fields with a focus on trauma.

Goodspeed-Chadwick is an assistant professor of English for the Division of Liberal Arts.