This timely conference takes contemporary representations of female sadness as its critical object, asking how we might read the ‘sad girl’ as an artefact of the historic – late capitalist and neoconservative – present. While mental health remains largely the preserve of Biomedical and/or Psychology departments, this conference will foreground interdisciplinary and intersectional humanities perspectives on gendered emotion, thereby widening the scope of what counts as knowledge, and who count as experts, on mental health and wellbeing.