Call for Papers - Health, Welfare, and Mutual Support in Maritime Communities

Posted: Friday 14th August 2026

Event date: 14 January 2027

Event Location: Greenwich, London

Organisers: National Martime Museum

The focus of this one-day workshop/symposium on 14 January 2027 at the National Maritime Museum (NMM) is the disciplinary crossroads between medical, social, and maritime history. The aim is to bring researchers interested in these fields together to present research and create connections across an area of emergent research. 

Much traditional scholarship on maritime healthcare has focused on the Navy, hospitals, and elite medical practitioners, imagining the establishment of permanent naval hospitals as the positive conclusion of inevitable progress. 

Recent scholarship has challenged this narrative, emphasising the partial and socially restrictive aspects of increasingly institutionalised systems of maritime health care. Medical humanities have increasingly incorporated approaches of social history, but this has only recently begun to address the specific histories and concerns of maritime communities. 

Overview of the workshop

This workshop aims to place naval and institutional medical care within a broader context of informal healthcare and mutual support within maritime communities, informing and encouraging future research in this developing field. 

NMM conceive 'maritime communities’ to include not only mariners working in the Navy or commercial shipping, but also those working in shipbuilding and other maritime industries on land, as well as their related familial and social networks. 

Researchers are invited to share work on these topics ranging from the early modern period onwards (approximately 1550-1850). Specific themes are listed below, and we welcome submissions on all areas connected to the broader themes of the event.

Hosted by the National Maritime Museum, the workshop will include opportunities for focused discussion in a number of themed panels. 

Proposals may address or connect to, but are not limited by, the following themes: 

• Formal and informal systems of healthcare in relation to maritime labour (i.e. in naval and commercial shipping, but also in land-based maritime industries such as shipbuilding)
• Structures of welfare and poor relief within maritime communities
• Social networks and mutual support within maritime communities
• Experiences and conceptions of disability in maritime communities
• The impacts of trauma and wider experiences of mental health in maritime communities
• Approaches to ageing and life-cycle poverty in maritime communities
• Practitioners and recipients of care within maritime communities
• The institutionalisation of care and its effects upon maritime communities

Find out more on how to apply here: Call for Papers: Health, Welfare, and Mutual Support in Maritime Communities, 1550 – 1850 | Royal Museums Greenwich

Deadline for submissions: 23.59 BST on Wednesday 30 September.