From Overwork to Burnout: Measuring and Managing Fatigue

In this presentation, Elizabeth Stephens, founder of the Australasian Health and Medical Humanities Network, will share early insights from her new ARC-funded project on the cultural history of fatigue, and invites attendees to help shape that research by contributing their own experiences and perspectives on fatigue and burnout in the contemporary workplace.

The end of the nineteenth century saw a spike in medical writing and moral concern about the prevalence of surmenage, or overwork, produced by conditions in factories, offices, and schools of industrialised societies. Fatigue marked the limits of the body’s capacity to work—physically and/or cognitively—but its management proved particularly challenging, naming an experiential state rather than a purely physiological or quantifiable condition that could be identified through measurement. This presentation examines how the nineteenth-century concept of fatigue as cumulative wear or chronic overstrain on the body under specific industrial, educational, or domestic regimes was transformed into its contemporary form as an individualised, manageable deficit to be managed through both surveillance and recovery interventions.

Elizabeth Stephens is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at UQ, and author of four books, including Artificial Life: the Art of Automating Living Systems (2026). She is founder of the Australasian Health and Medical Humanities Network, lead CI on a new ARC-funded, 3-year research project on the cultural history of fatigue, and co-editor, with Alison Downham Moore and Sheila Cavanagh, of Australian Feminist Studies.