The Literature, Medicine, and Culture Colloquium (LMCC) at UNC is excited for our next meeting, which will be our final meeting of the semester and of the academic year! We will meet on Wednesday, April 22 at 5:30pm eastern time strictly over Zoom, using our usual link: https://unc.zoom.us/j/99228197675. If you have trouble with the Zoom link, please email either of the Co-Directors. (See our email addresses on the “Home” page of this site.)
For our April meeting, we’ll be discussing an ongoing debate around trauma studies. Specifically, we’d like everyone to read the following articles:
- “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” by Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker (Dec. 27, 2021)
- “A Posthumous Shock: How Everything Became Trauma” by Will Self, Harper’s Magazine (Dec. 2021)
- Suggested optional reading: “‘They’re selling everything as trauma’: How Our Emotional Pain Became a Product” by Katherine Rowland, The Guardian (Dec. 14, 2025)
We’ve provided links to all three articles here and also on the “Readings” page of the LMCC website. In case you run into trouble accessing any of the articles online, we’ve also posted .pdf versions of all three articles on the “Readings” page as well.
If you run into trouble accessing any of the texts, please contact one of the Co-Directors. (See our email addresses on the Home page of this site).
If you have any questions, please contact us directly. Please also feel free to share this info with other graduate or professional students who might be interested! We look forward to meeting with you all for an exciting discussion of this work!
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Note: The featured image for this post is an illustration by Aldo Jarillo from Sehgal’s article in The New Yorker.