Over the past decade there has been a moral panic about inappropriate body size. Anoerxia nervosa and obesity have become touchstones for discussions of social and personal failure, of the supremacy of genetics over human choice, of the global expansion of normative ideas of the body—indeed, for virtually all discussions about what has gone wrong in our contemporary world. Meanwhile, artistic representations offer another vision of what it means to inhabit a body. This panel will examine the interlocked questions of the meanings attached today to bodily difference and representation, and the role that these debates play in our psychological and physical well-being.

Paul Campos is Professor of Law at the University of Colorado and a syndicated columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service. He has written widely about the legal, medical, and social consequences of narrow definitions of what constitutes a "normal body." He is the author of The Obesity Myth. His work on this subject has been featured in Scientific American, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications.

Sander Gilman is a Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University, where he is the Director of the Program in Psychoanalysis and the Health Sciences Humanities Initiative. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of eighty books. His Oxford lectures, Multiculturalism and the Jews, appeared in 2006. His most recent edited volume, Diets and Dieting: A Cultural Encyclopedia, appeared in 2007. He has held professorships in humanities and medicine at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also served as the Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda; as a fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; as a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; and as the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University.

Marcel Kinsbourne is a behavioral neurologist and Professor of Psychology at the New School. He is the author of The Asymmetrical Function of the Brain, The Unity and the Diversity of the Human Brain, and Consciousness: The Brain's Private Psychological Field.