Merde Alors! An interdisciplinary conference on excrement, past, present and future

Hosted by the SOAS Food Studies Centre, this unique international conference will include discussions of the uses of excrement in the pursuit of wars and social struggles, in the archaeological record, and in the realm of biomedicals and medicine, among many other areas.

It will be an in-person conference with options for distance participation.

• Conference website
• Abstracts

Registration

Any requests for conference registrations made after 6 October 2023 should be sent by email to ed.emery@soas.ac.uk.

Confirmations will be sent by return.

Programme

1. Breaking the silence on gendered sanitation taboos across urban Africa
   Adriana Allen, University College London
2. From the privy to the paper: Excrement, public health, and discourses of race in the Progressive Era US South 
   Jared Kazik Asser, University of Georgia
3. "Boys will be boys": The putto pissatore in European Renaissance art
   Charles Avery, independent researcher
4. Keeping soils healthy with shit: What we can learn from Chinese farmers
   Nicole Elizabeth Barnes, Duke University
5. ADCO and the case of a patented artificial manure
   Tad Brown, University of Cambridge
6. Cess pits and society
   John Collis, University of Sheffield
7. From gunpowder to fertiliser: How Confederates used human waste during the American Civil War and Reconstruction (Working Title)
   Andrew Loyd Craig, University of Georgia
8. The case against Anglia Water
   Al Dixon, Little Blue Dot
9. The "Dirty Strike" of Irish Republican prisoners in British jails, 1976–81
   Ed Emery, SOAS University of London
10. The remarkable preservation of excrement in the archaeological record and what can be done with it
    Eleanor Green, University of York and Natural History Museum, London
11. Excrement in the City: Tokyo, 1867–1933
    David L. Howell, Harvard University
12. Shit and Civilisation: Western reports on nightsoil in 18th and 19th century China
    Jorg H. Huesemann, Leipzig University
13. Between economic and hygienic reasons: Recovering and using excrement in Italian cities and countryside in the late 19th century
    Luciano Maffi, University of Parma, and Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, University of Perugia
14. Brown Gold? Reconciling existing practices and new innovations for shit re-use
    Lyla Mehta (Institute of Development Studies) and Tanvi Bhatkal (Institute of Development Studies) et al
15. Merda Pompeiana
    Laura Nissin, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies
16. "Shit business is serious business": Isaac Durojaiye Agbetusin ('Otunba Gaddafi') and the business of mobile toilets in Lagos (Nigeria) since the 1990s
    Ayodeji Olukoju, University of Lagos
17. How latrines lost the war: Race, waste, disease, and demoralization in the Confederate Army
    Benjamin Roy, University of Georgia
18. Dump and pump: The impact of COVID-19 and income on septic system pumping patterns in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia
    Julia Sharapi, University of Georgia
19. Building protection: Public bathrooms and boundary making in United States history
    Bryant Simon, Temple University, Department of History
20. "A stench so terrible": The possibility of nitrebeds in Middle Period East Asia (900–1400AD)
    Benjamin Avichai Katz Sinvany, Columbia University

Featured image by Little Blue Dot.