Science and Literature Reading Group

This blog will no longer be updated.

2010-10-19T09:51:00.000Z

See the HPS website here for the updated term's reading list.
See the BSLS website here for news listings of Literature and Science events.

Play - Hidden Glory: Dorothy Hodgkin in her own words

2010-10-13T12:50:00.001Z

Georgina Ferry writes:

This year is the centenary of Dorothy Hodgkin, Britain's only female Nobel prizewinner. To mark the anniversary I wrote a short one-woman show based on her life, work and writings. It was performed in Oxford in the week of the anniversary in May, to accompany the unveiling of a bust of her in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

The production is coming to Cambridge next month, with three performances at the Old Labs, Newnham College, on 12 and 13 November. Tickets are on sale on the door or through an online agency: the link is
www.wegottickets.com/www.wegottickets.com/f/p/1/2059

Conference - Approaches to Art and Science after Berenson

2010-10-05T10:36:00.000Z

A conference in honour of Martin Kemp

On Friday 22 October 2010, Ms Gheri Sackler and the Leonardo da Vinci Society will host at
St. John's College Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum a conference on the relationship between
scientific models in nature and the theory and practice of art. It will address results of forty
years of cross-disciplinary approaches to the histories of art and science. The main reason for
this conference is to honour Emeritus Professor Martin Kemp, a former Hon. President of the
Leonardo da Vinci Society, who retired from the University of Oxford in 2008.

The programme includes:

Mr David Hockney, CH, RA: Reflections on the Lost Techniques of Old Masters
Prof Frank Zöllner (Universität Leipzig): Automimesis -The History of an Idea
Prof Donald Preziosi (University of Calfornia, Los Angeles): Pausanias' Polygnotus and the Parallax of Parnassos
Prof Claire Farago (University of Colorado): The Artless Art of Leonardo's Treatise on Painting, c. 1570
Prof Francesca Fiorani (University of Virginia): Leonardo's Shadows
Prof Domenico Laurenza (Museo Galileo, Florence): Sixteenth Century Anatomical Drawings & Prints. How Scientists were indebted to Artists: New Evidence
Mr Francis Wells (Papworth Hospital, Cambridge): The Accuracy and Modern Relevance of Leonardo's Anatomical Studies of the Heart
Dr J. V. Field (Birkbeck, University of London): Panofsky on Perspective
Prof Philip Steadman (University College, London): 2D to 3D: Adventures with Martin Kemp in Reconstructing the Space of Paintings

Registration forms and further information available here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hosted/leonardo

The Leonardo da Vinci Society http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hosted/leonardo

Posted on behalf of the organisers, Matthew Landrus and Juliana Barone
, to whom any queries should be addressed.

18th October

2010-10-04T10:21:00.001Z

For our first meeting of Michaelmas Term 2010 on the theme of 'Extreme Events' we shall be reading Daniel Defoe's The Storm (1704), especially Chapter III, "Of the Storm in General", pp. 26-36 in the Penguin Classics edition. To find this chapter online, search for the phrase "before we come to examine the damage" on Google books.We meet from 7.30-9pm in the Skillicorn Room at Homerton College, in the Ibberson Building on this map. All welcome!

Fantastic Fungus Day - Whipple Museum

2010-09-29T11:58:00.003Z

What: FREE creative writing workshop.
Please note that booking is required for this event.
Email: hps-whipple-museum@lists.cam.ac.uk Telephone: 01223 330906

Where: The Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge.

When: Saturday 30 October 2010, 10am – 2pm with lunch break from 12-1.

This event is part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

How did a history of science museum end up with a case of hand-blown glass models…of fungus? Come find out!

Writers are invited to look, listen, and write in a workshop which will include a talk on the history of the glass fungi models on display in the Whipple Museum, a discussion on mushrooms in medicine, and a collection of poetry about mushrooms.

Schedule:

10:00-10:30: Introductions; Kelley Swain, writer-in-residence at the Whipple, will lead a reading and discussion of samples of mushroom poetry. (Guests will each receive a packet of collected mushroom poetry)
10:30 - 11:00: PhD student Ruth Horry will give a short talk on the display of glass fungi
11:00-11:30: Time for discussion, writing, and examining the glass fungi models.
11:30-12:00: Reconvene for short talk by Dr. Richard Barnett on mushrooms in medicine.
12:00-1:00: Break for lunch.
1:00-1:30: Time for discussion, writing. Real mushrooms will be available as writing prompts.
1:30-1:50: Those who wish to share what they have written will be invited to do so.
1:50-2:00: Feedback forms!

BSLS Book Prize

2010-09-28T14:03:00.002Z

The British Society for Literature and Science is pleased to invite nominations for the annual BSLS Book Prize. The prize of £150, together with a year's free membership of the BSLS, will be awarded for the best book published in English in 2010 in the field of literature and science. Monographs, edited volumes, editions and books of creative writing are all eligible for consideration, excepting books wholly or partly written by members of the BSLS executive.

Please send nominations, giving the author(s) or editor(s), title and publisher, to Dr John Holmes (book-prize convenor) at j.r.holmes@reading.ac.uk, with 'BSLS Book Prize' as the subject heading. The deadline for receipt of nominations is 17 January 2010.

* The book prize was launched in 2007. The past winners are Ralph O'Connor for 'The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856' (University of Chicago Press, 2007); George Levine for 'Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science' (Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Leah Knight for 'Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture' (Ashgate, 2009).

* Nominations are invited from BSLS members and from publishers. The authors or editors of the nominated books need not be BSLS members. BSLS members are welcome to nominate their own books.

* The book must have 2010 as its publication date.

* The winner of this year's prize will be announced at the sixth annual conference of the BSLS in April 2011 at Homerton College, Cambridge.

* The prize will be paid by means of a cheque made out in pounds sterling.

This is a news website article about a scientific paper...

2010-09-27T16:27:00.002Z

From the Guardian.

Seminar - From Tristram Shandy to Bad Sex: Some Uses of Mathematics in Fiction

2010-09-27T15:16:00.000Z

An LKL Maths-Art seminar by Tony Mann
Thursday 14 October 2010, 6.00 - 7.30pm

The worlds of mathematics and fiction might be thought to have little in common, but mathematics has featured in many novels, and many novelists have engaged seriously with mathematics and mathematicians. A few (perhaps surprisingly few) mathematicians have written fiction; many real and imaginary mathematicians have been appropriated as fictional characters, and novelists have based work on various mathematical structures and devices. This talk will examine some of these literary uses of mathematics. It will look at some illustrative examples from Plath to Borges and the Oulipo, mention some of the recent crop of diverse and fascinating mathematical novels, and discuss some of the issues that arise from this meeting of disciplines.

In his twenty-one years at the University of Greenwich, TONY MANN has taught mathematics, software engineering and digital media. His roles at the University have included Head of Department of Mathematical Sciences, 2002-2010. Before becoming an academic he worked as a software engineer in the electricity supply industry, writing mathematical modelling software. He is currently President of the British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM), is also Treasurer of the interdisciplinary Leonardo da Vinci Society, and has served on the Committee of the Computer Arts Society. In 2009 he organised a conference on Mathematics and Fiction in Oxford, following which he published an article in the BSHM Bulletin about mathematics and fiction.

DATE: Thursday 14th October
TIME: 6.00 to 7.30pm
PLACE: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald St, London, WC1N 3QS
[Travel information & maps at: http://bit.ly/LKL-MathsArt-venue ]

All welcome. No reservation required, but an email to lkl.maths.art@gmail.com is appreciated for planning purposes.

Journal of Science Communication - Is Science Communication a Discipline?

2010-09-22T09:01:00.000Z

The September 2010 issue of the open access JCOM - Journal of Science Communication - (issue 3 volume 9) includes a number of commentaries that explore the question of whether science communication is a discipline. Details are included below, including an overview from the editor, Nico Pitrelli.

COMMENT

Road maps for the 21st-century research in Science Communication

Nico Pitrelli

This is an introduction to the essays from the Jcom commentary devoted to the statute and the future of research in science communication. The authors have a long experience in international research in this domain. In the past few years, they have all been committed to the production of collective works which
are now the most important references for science communication research programmes in the next few years.
What topics should science communication research focus on and why? What is its general purpose? What is its real degree of autonomy from other similar fields of study? In other words, is science communication its 'own' field? These are some of the questions addressed by the in-depth discussion in this Jcom issue,
with the awareness that science communication is a young, brittle research field, looking for a shared map, but also one of the most stimulating places of the contemporary academic panorama.

http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/

**********

Notes from some spaces in-between

Alice R. Bell

Science communication is less a community of researchers, but more a space where communities of research coexist to study and deal with communities of researchers. It is, as a field, a consequence of the spaces left between areas of expertise in (late) modern society. It exists to deal with the fragmentations of expertise in today’s society. In between those fragments is where it lives. It’s not an easy position, but an awareness of this unease is part of how science communication scholars can be most effective; as we examine, reflect, debate and help others manage the inescapable cultural gaps of post/late modern knowledge communities.

http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/Jcom0903%282010%29C02

**********

Brian Trench, Massimiano Bucchi

Science communication, an emerging discipline

Several publications have sought to define the field of science communication and review current issues and recent research. But the status of science communication is uncertain in disciplinary terms. This commentary considers two dimensions of the status of discipline as they apply to science communication – the clarity with which the field is defined and the level of development of theories to guide formal studies. It argues that further theoretical development is needed to support science communication’s full emergence as a
discipline.

http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/Jcom0903%282010%29C03

**********
Toss Gascoigne, Donghong Cheng, Michel Claessens, Jenni Metcalfe, Bernard
Schiele, Shunke Shi

Is science communication its own field?

The present comment examines to what extent science communication has attained the status of an academic discipline and a distinct research field, as opposed to the common view that science communication is merely a sub-discipline of media studies, sociology of science or history of science. Against this background, the authors of this comment chart the progress science communication has made as an emerging subject over the last 50 years in terms of a number of measures. Although discussions are still ongoing about the elements that must be present to constitute a legitimate disciplinary field, we show here that science communication meets four key elements that constitute an analytical framework to classify academic disciplines: the presence of a
community; a history of inquiry; a mode of inquiry that defines how data is collected; and the existence of a communications network.

http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/Jcom0903%282010%29C04

**********

Richard Holliman

From analogue to digital scholarship: implications for science communication
researchers

Digital media have transformed the social practices of science communication. They have extended the number of channels that scientists, media professionals, other stakeholders and citizens use to communicate scientific information. Social media provide opportunities to communicate in more immediate and informal ways, while digital technologies have the potential to make the various processes of research more visible in the public sphere. Some digital media also offer, on occasion, opportunities for interaction and engagement. Similarly, ideas about public engagement are shifting and extending social practices, partially influencing governance strategies, and science communication policies and practices. In this paper I explore this developing context via a personal journey from an analogue to a digital scholar. In so doing, I discuss some of the demands that a globalised digital landscape introduces for science communication researchers and document some of the skills and competencies required to be a digital scholar of science communication.

http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/Jcom0903%282010%29C05

**********

Coming of age in the academy? The status of our emerging field

Susanna Hornig Priest

Science communication is certainly growing as an academic field, as well as a professional specialization. This calls to mind predictions made decades ago about the ways in which the explosion of scientific knowledge was envisioned as the likely source of new difficulties in the relationship between science and society. It is largely this challenge that has inspired the creation of the field of science communication. Has science communication become its own academic subdiscipline in the process? What exactly does this entail?

http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/09/03/Jcom0903%282010%29C01/Jcom0903%282010%29C06

CFP - Lost and Found: In Search of Extinct Species

2010-09-21T09:01:00.000Z

Explora International Conference
31 March–1 April 2011
CAS (EA – 801) / Toulouse Natural History Museum

Extinction has always fascinated and intrigued men, be they men of science or men of letters. The history of the Earth has been marked by five major mass extinctions, the most famous being undoubtedly the one that saw the end of the dinosaurs on Earth at the close of the Cretaceous period. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the increasing number of paleontological discoveries challenged certainties about the origins and place of man on Earth. The scientists’ search for extinct species and their conclusions, or surmises, undermined literalist readings of the Bible. Hinting at the issue of extinction, the discoveries paved the way for the development of evolutionary theory, climaxing with the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species in 1859. The study of fossils was thus poised between conflicting interpretations of the evolution of life on Earth: fossils crystallized conflicts, bringing to light the tensions between science and religion and epitomizing the period’s questionings as to the past and future of man on Earth.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to look at the way in which extinct species and past ecosystems have been represented and sensationalized from the nineteenth century to the present time. It will examine how man’s sudden awareness of species extinction (from the Dodo bird and the Moa to the more recent American pigeon) and/or the threat of extinction have informed literature and the arts, particularly focussing on the impact of climate change in literary and non-literary narratives, on the issue of man’s (in)significance in the history of the Earth and on the literary and artistic significance of end-of-world scenarios.

We invite 20-minute papers that engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics :

- the history of paleontology and fossil classification
- the history of fossil collecting
- the popularisation of geology and paleontology
- the reconstructions of extinct species
- representations of extinct species in literature and the arts
- representations of ecosystems in literature and the arts
- extinct species, ecology and the development of ecocriticism
- theories of mass extinction
- end-of-world scenarios

Please send 300-word proposals (attached as a .doc-file) together with a short biographical note to exploraextinctspecies@yahoo.com. Deadline for submissions: 20 November 2010.

Talk - Mathematics as Art in Contemporary Theatre

2010-09-14T16:16:00.000Z

Monday, 18 October 2010, 12:45 - 14:00, CRASSH

Part of the CRASSH Fellows Work-in-Progress seminar series. All welcome, no registration necessary. Sandwich lunch and refreshments provided.

Dr Stephen Abbott (Mathematics/Middlebury)

Abstract

While there are a few notable plays written about mathematics and science throughout the previous century, a qualitative shift in the relationship between science and theater occurred sometime in the past decade following the success of Arcadia (Tom Stoppard, 1993) and Copenhagen (Michael Frayn, 1999). In the ensuing years, theater has seen a proliferation of successful plays that manage to synthesize explicit mathematical ideas into both the theme and mechanics of the performance.

This is not a case of theater simply mining science for interesting source material. What happens in the best mathematical plays is that the metaphors work in both directions as does the sense of illumination. This cross-pollination is most easily experienced in plays with explicit mathematical content (A Disappearing Number, Proof) but it can also be analyzed in relation to form. In fact, a defining trait of modern science plays is the successful way in which they exploit the merging of form and content. What is significant is that 20th century mathematics—and in particular mathematical logic—is also characterized by investigations into the consequences of merging form and content. These structural similarities reveal an even deeper kinship between drama and mathematics than might be expected.

To access the Readings for the Work in Progress seminar, please contact Michelle Maciejewska.

Isis Focus Section - History of Science and Literature and Science: Convergences and Divergences

2010-09-09T12:54:00.001Z

The latest issue of Isis, just out, has an interesting-looking Focus section. It's free to access, at the following links:

Possible theatrical trips...

2010-09-08T14:41:00.000Z

There are three plays of interest to group members on over the next few weeks that I thought it might be fun to go and see:

Bedlam is currently playing at the Globe in London, until the beginning of October.
A Disappearing Number will be live-streamed at the Arts Picturhouse on 14th October.
The Alchemist is on at the ADC from 12-16th October.

I'll send a message to the mailing list to see who's interested - or let me know if you'd like to join a group outing to any of these!

Michaelmas Term 2010: Meteorology and Climate Change

2010-08-23T13:45:00.001Z

We meet on Mondays from 7.30 to 9pm in the Skillicorn and Bamford rooms at Homerton College. Many of the selections we have chosen are available online. Copies of the harder-to-obtain items will be placed in our box file in the Whipple Library. Organised by Daniel Friesner (Science Museum) and Melanie Keene (Homerton College). See this blog for news and updates; email Melanie to join our dedicated mailing list. All welcome!

18th October (in the Skillicorn room): Extreme events

Daniel Defoe, The Storm (1704), especially Chapter III, "Of the Storm in General", pp. 26-36 in the Penguin Classics edition. To find this chapter online, search for the phrase "before we come to examine the damage" on google books.

1st November (in the Bamford room): Clouds

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poems in honour of Luke Howard (1820-22). Translated in Kurt Badt, John Constable's Clouds, trans. Stanley Godman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), pp. 12-14.
To find this online, search for the phrase "walks and flickers" on google books.

John Ruskin, The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century: two lectures delivered at the London Institution (1884). Lecture 1, 4th February, especially the beginning and end of the lecture, pp. 1-8 and 29-44 on Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/details/thestormcloudofn00ruskuoft pp. 1-6 and 20-30 on Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20204

15th November (in the Skillicorn room): Weather control

Eliza Leslie, "The Rain King; or, A Glance at the Next Century". Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 25, July 1842, pp. 7-11. To find this online, search for the phrase "so many new stars had been added" on google books.

Carl Barks, "The Master Rainmaker". Walt Disney's Comics & Stories #156 (Vol. 13, No. 12, September 1953). Reprinted in Walt Disney's Donald Duck, No. 284 (Series II), May 1994. Also reprinted (in black and white) in The Journal of Weather Modification, Vol. 23, No. 1, April 1991, pp. 90-100.

Daniil Granin, Idu na grozu (1961). Translated as Into The Storm (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965) pp. 33-39, 182-187, 197-203, 239-249, 254-257, 307-309.

29th November (in the Skillicorn Room): Cooling down and warming up

Arthur C. Clarke, "The Forgotten Enemy". King's College Review, December 1948, pp. 20-24.
Reprinted in various collections, including SF: Author's Choice 4 and The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. To hear the story, followed by a discussion, go to http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2008/10/a-bite-of-stars-a-slug-of-time-and-thou-episode-16/

J. G. Ballard, "The Drowned World". Science Fiction Adventures, #24 (Vol. 4, January 1962), pp. 2-56, especially pp. 2-25 and 55-56. (This is the original novella, which was afterwards expanded into a novel.)

CFP - Poetry and Melancholia

2010-08-23T11:36:00.000Z

University of Stirling, 8-10 July 2011

Keynote speakers: Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, University of London), Don Paterson (Poet), and Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton University). Other speakers include John Drakakis (Stirling University), Lorna Hutson (University of St Andrews), Ron Levao (Rutgers University), Cornelia D. J. Pearsall (Smith College) and David G. Riede (Ohio State University)

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the nature and representation of melancholia within poetry and its relationship to poetics and poetic creation from the Renaissance to the present. Drawing together contributors from Art History, Literature, Medical Humanities, Philosophy, and Print Media, Poetry and Melancholia will try to examine the variety of forms that melancholia has historically taken and extend its meaning beyond the social, medical and epistemological norms that had framed it as a sign of mental illness or a way of behaving to that of a cultural idea. We aim to define not only the different configurations and significance of melancholia as mood, feeling, state of mind, and a cultural outlook but also the role that modernity has played in its development from a medical discourse to a dispositional perspective. The Stirling International Poetry Conference has always been an event that both welcomes and supports practising poets, and this year working poets are especially welcome to participate by giving readings of their work and engaging in the subject debates around melancholia and poetry.

Themes:

Aesthetics: the sublime, art and longing, decadence, narcissism and loss, revelations of destruction, degeneration, eroticism, melancholy genius, nostalgia, spleen, the states of boredom

Affect: sensibility, solitude and alienation, despair, grief, suffering and sadness, distorted senses, mood as language, psychology, transference, the workings of sympathy, haunting and return

Biomedical sciences: clinical depression, malady, delirium, humors, mental derangement, physiology and pathologies of the mind, psychoanalytic workings of mourning, somatic conditions

Nature, Space, and Landscape: landscape and distance, the resistance of physical objects, conflicts with nature, interior distance and phenomenology

Poetics: creativity, idleness and labour, imagination, inspiration and delirium, the politics of form and genre (allegory, elegy, lyric, and pastoral, etc.), poetry's relation to the visual and plastic arts

Tradition and History: appropriations of classical theories of melancholia, the idea of tainted inheritance, the traditions of witchcraft and the demonic, the past as loss, writing and memory

Sociology: alienation, anomalies of self-consciousness and the will, fragmentation and conflicts of modernity, otherness, gender, class, race, sexuality, social role of the poet, suicide

Please submit 300 word abstracts for 20 minute papers or proposals for panels together with a short biographical note or CV to Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and David Miller at poetryandmelancholia@stir.ac.uk by no later than 15 January 2011.

BAVS has sponsored the conference to subsidise postgraduate participation. The Society for the Social History of Medicine offers three bursaries (£150 each) for postgraduate historians of medicine who have been accepted to give a paper as part of the conference.

Dates for Next Term

2010-08-19T08:08:00.000Z

The Science and Literature Reading Group will meet from 7.30-9pm on the following Mondays in Michaelmas Term: 18th October, 1st, 15th, and 29th November. We meet at Homerton College, in the Skillicorn and Bamford rooms. Full details of our programme on meteorology and climate change will be announced in the coming weeks.

British Science Festival Events - Literature

2010-08-19T08:05:00.001Z

This year's British Science Festival at the University of Birmingham runs from 14th-19th September. Literary events on the programme include:

Open Mic: There's Science in my Fiction (And Poetry)
7-10pm, 15th September, Old Joint Stock Function Room, free

"What if..?" ask both scientists and fiction writers. What if a gene mutates? What if she never married him? Science is fabulous inspiration for fiction - come read out your science-inspired stories and poems to win great prizes, including a Focus magazine subscription and champagne. Science-inspired authors Tania Hershman, Sue Guiney and Brian Clegg will judge. Put some science in your fiction!

Play: The Heresy of Nature
3-5pm, 18th September, The Library Theatre, Central Library, £3

A semi-staged play about the discovery of a Universe that appears indifferent to the human condition. Galileo and Darwin face ancient beliefs (represented by a cardinal) as they unravel the mysteries of Nature, while a couple of modern citizens fight against the apparent spiritual desolation of the Universe by seeking natural paths towards hope, meaning and purpose for the human existence.

Play: The Beagle Has Landed!
7-9pm, 18th September, G11, Aston University

The Missing, Inc. bring to life a hilarious – and wildly inaccurate -account of Charles Darwin's voyage aboard HMS Beagle, his marriage to his cousin Emma, and some stuff about natural selection. (Contains beards and scenes of mild evolution.)

To book and for further information about the Festival, see here.

British Science Festival Events - History

2010-08-19T07:42:00.000Z

The British Science Festival 2010 takes place in Birmingham from 14-19 September.

The History of Science Section President this year is Frank James, Professor of the History of Science at the Royal Institution. His Presidential Session, Why is the Huxley-Wilberforce ‘debate’ so well known? takes place on Sunday 19th September, 6-8pm.

Other events organised by the History of Science Section at the Birmingham Festival:

Food in our Lives – Thursday 16th September, 1-3pm
Philosophical Pirates: Industrial Espionage as a Form of Knowledge Transfer in Eighteenth Century Birmingham – Thursday 16th September, 3-4.30pm
Tomorrow’s World: Past Visions of Future Technology – Saturday 18th September, 6-8pm (with Metropolis screening at the Electric Cinema, Sunday 19th – TBC)

Related events:

Organised by the BSHS Outreach and Education Committee, the Young People’s Programme features Science and Islam: Discover the Astrolabe. Thursday 16th and Friday 17th September.

Organised by the Physics and Astronomy Section, with the Royal Society: The Royal Society at 350. Friday 17th September.

With the University of Manchester: Drinking up Time: Science and Alcohol since 1600. Saturday 18th September, 7-8pm.

Overview of events in the Science Festival’s History, Heritage & Religion strand.

Preliminary reading for next term...

2010-08-12T12:51:00.000Z

Anyone looking for a summer read could get a head start on next term's theme of meteorology and climate change and take a look at Daniel Defoe's The Storm (1704), which we will be discussing at our first meeting in October.

"Why does theatre plus science equal poor plays?"

2010-08-11T16:05:00.000Z

A recent article on the Guardian website asks this question.

Routledge Companion to Literature and Science

2010-07-20T14:19:00.000Z

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science is about to be published. Details are available on the publishers' website:

With forty-four newly commissioned articles from an international cast of leading scholars,The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science traces the network of connections among literature, science, technology, mathematics, and medicine. Divided into three main sections, this volume:
Links diverse literatures to scientific disciplines from Artificial Intelligence to Thermodynamics
Surveys current theoretical and disciplinary approaches from Animal Studies to Semiotics
Traces the history and culture of literature and science from Greece and Rome to Postmodernism
Ranging from classical origins and modern revolutions to current developments in cultural science studies and the posthumanities, this indispensible volume offers a comprehensive resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers.
With authoritative, accessible, and succinct treatments of the sciences in their literary dimensions and cultural frameworks, here is the essential guide to this vibrant area of study.

Members of the British Society for Literature and Science are eligible for a discount.

On the Human - online forum

2010-07-06T11:20:00.000Z

A fairly recent initiative of the National Humanities Center is 'On the Human', an online forum for humanities scholars and scientists to ’share their ideas and research’. A number of eminent scholars in the literature and science field have published essays in the forum, including N. Katherine Hayles (‘Distributing/Disturbing the Chinese Room’) and Joseph Carroll (‘The Adaptive Function of Literature and the Other Arts’), and each is followed by substantial comments from other scholars. The site recently published a new essay on ‘Late Darwin and the Problem of the Human’ by Gillian Beer. Former Science and Literature Reading Group member Katy Price's poetic response to the essay is on her blog here.

"Three Tales" Screening

2010-07-06T10:56:00.000Z

Adrian will be screening Steve Reich's "Three Tales" on Thursday 8th July at 7.30pm. Contact Melanie if you'd like to come along (space is limited), and for directions.

Royal Society @ 350

2010-06-23T13:34:00.000Z

Details of the literary events planned as part of the Royal Society's 350th anniversary celebrations on the South Bank next week can be found here. They include appearances by Jocelyn Bell-Burnell and Jamie McKendrick, Gabriel Weston, Adam Foulds and Samantha Harvey, a discussion on science fiction, and a family poetry workshop.

William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography - Exhibition at Trinity College

2010-06-23T09:05:00.002Z

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) is now primarily remembered as a pioneer of photography. Talbot's work, however, extended across the natural sciences, mathematics, classical scholarship and Assyriology. His wide-ranging interests are documented in his vast correspondence with leading Victorian scientists and his non-photographic notebooks, some of which are on display in the Wren Library until 9 July.

The Wren Library is open to visitors from 12.00 until 2.00, Monday to Friday.

Fairy Tale Physics: Myths and Legends Explained

2010-06-17T16:52:00.002Z

See here for a 2005 National Geographic article about an Australian initiative.

Once upon a time in the land of chemistry...

2010-06-15T14:52:00.001Z

See here for 'a case for fantasy writing in chemistry'.

Flatland illustrations, and more

2010-06-15T13:39:00.000Z

Shannon May's illustrations for Flatland, and other art and science images, are online here.

Scientizing the Other: Science, Medicine and the Study of Human Difference, 1800-1950

2010-06-15T13:30:00.002Z

A one-day international postgraduate student conference to be held at Churchill College, University of Cambridge

Tuesday, 22 June 2010

For the last two hundred years, members of the scientific and medical establishments have represented and misrepresented peoples of different class, sex, race, age and ability in their efforts to chart human variation. This conference will explore how science has been used to evaluate the ‘other’ in society, and will examine the various means by which seemingly objective conclusions were reached concerning whole segments of the population.

Papers given will include:

Yoshiya Makita (Hitotsubashi University): ‘Institutionalizing the Disabled Other: Social Policy over the ‘Feeble-Minded’ in the United States and Japan and the Turn of the Twentieth Century’
Amir Teicher (Tel-Aviv University): ‘Identity, Purity and Otherness in the Praxis of Genealogical Tree Formation in Germany, 1900-1936’
Jenny Bangham (University of Cambridge): ‘The blood groups of the Basques: constructing a new anthropological tool, 1945-1960’
Christina Wu (Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales): ‘Diagnosing Passion in the Tropics: ‘Amok’ and Colonial Classification in British Malaya’
Fenneke Sysling (VU University Amsterdam): ‘Between Data and Experience: Physical Anthropology in the Dutch Indies, 1890s-1920s’
Jed Foland (University of Oxford): ‘Women’s Colleges and the Pursuit of Eugenics in the United States, 1910-1930’
Clare Tebutt (University of Manchester): ‘Male/Female/Other: 1930s Intersex Research and its Popular dissemination’
Howard H. Chiang (Princeton University): ‘How to Do the History of Transsexuality in China’

There will also be a concluding keynote address by Dr. Gavin Schaffer (University of Portsmouth) on the topic 'Racial Science and British Society'

Registration is free and the event begins at 9am

New Fairy Tales - online magazine

2010-06-10T15:54:00.001Z

See here for further details, and here for the latest issue (#5 - including a contribution by Kelley Swain).

Play - Blooming Snapdragons at the Royal Institution

2010-06-07T12:53:00.002Z

Wednesday 14 July 2010, 7.00pm-8.30pm

100 years ago was an exciting time of discovery in the newly developing science of genetics. Mankind was starting to uncover the very building blocks of life and what makes us, but what about womankind? This was a time when women couldn’t receive degrees on completing their exams, and women’s colleges had to fund their own laboratories as male scientists wouldn’t let them complete practical work in their labs. And yet, the early work in this new field of genetics is filled with the names of women scientists.

Now, a new play is bringing these names to life to explore their dedication and their contribution against a backdrop of exclusion from the mainstream scientific community.

‘Blooming Snapdragons’, written and performed by Liz Rothschild and Syreeta Kumar, tells the story of a remarkable group of scientists, known collectively as Bateson’s Ladies, whose contribution to the first steps into the vast new territory of genetics is marked through their scientific achievements, whilst little is known of them as people. It explores their preclusion from the male dominated laboratories of universities and their relationship with William Bateson, who coined the word ‘genetics’ but was himself a marginalised figure in academic society.

William Bateson was the first director of the John Innes Institute, an organisation that is celebrating its centenary this year, and it through researching material for the centenary celebrations that much of the groundbreaking work of these remarkable ladies has come to light, and prompted the modern day John Innes Centre to commission a play to tell their stories.

“It has been a fascinating journey into this period of scientific history so relevant to the work being done today and a rare privilege to be invited, as a writer with no scientific background, into the everyday world of laboratories and glasshouses,” commented Liz Rothschild.

‘Blooming Snapdragons’ takes place in a contemporary laboratory as two scientists explore the lost story of these women. Playing a series of female scientists from the past, they examine the controversy around educating women and how their careers developed, whilst one of them wrestles with her own personal challenges today.

“As a person who found science subjects difficult and even boring at school it has been fascinating to explore the beauty and bravery of the work of Bateson’s Ladies and I hope it will kindle in those watching a curiosity and respect for the questions and challenges facing science now,” said Liz.

‘Blooming Snapdragons’ is directed by Sue Mayo and will be followed by a panel discussion with Sue and the cast about the issues raised.

Tickets cost £8 standard, £6 concessions, £4 Ri Members.

To book tickets go to http://www.rigb.org/contentControl?action=displayEvent&id=1004

John Tyndall Correspondence Symposium, Thursday 24th June 2010, University of Leeds

2010-06-07T12:48:00.000Z

This is a one-day symposium to bring together any researchers interested in the life, letters and works of nineteenth-century physicist and lecturer John Tyndall, and to discuss the international project to transcribe his correspondence.

Registration for the symposium is £5, which is payable on the day. As numbers are limited, if you would like to attend please contact Mike Finn (email: ph07maf@leeds.ac.uk ) by Friday 18th June.

Details of the event should soon be available at http://www.hps.leeds.ac.uk/News/index.htm, but in the meantime the programme is also viewable at http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~ph07maf/tyndall.htm and in outline below:

Outline Programme:
09:30 Arrivals & Registration

10:00 Introduction by Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds)

10:10 Session 1

Michael Reidy (Montana State University)
“Bringing Science to the Humanities: The John Tyndall Correspondence Project”

James Elwick (York University, Toronto)
“Transcribing Tyndall, or, how to make Collaborative Academic Networks more than just a Buzzphrase”

11:30 Session 2
Graeme Gooday & Jamie Stark (University of Leeds)
“John Tyndall: Lecturing, Authority and Correspondence in Victorian Public Science”

Mike Finn (University of Leeds)
“Following Your Example at a Distance: The Carlylean Balancing of John Tyndall & James Crichton-Browne”

Michael Reidy (Montana State University)
“John Tyndall’s Vertical Physics”

Lunch

14:00: Session 3
Frank James (Royal Institution of Great Britain)
“Father, Son, Brother, Colleague? Michael Faraday and John Tyndall”

Bernard Lightman (York University, Toronto)
“Tyndall and Patronage”

Wine Reception to close

This event has been generously supported by:
The Leeds Humanities Research Institute, The Wellcome Trust and the Royal Historical Society

CONFERENCE UPDATE: Reweaving the Rainbow: Literature & Philosophy, 1850-1910

2010-06-07T12:47:00.001Z

Registration is now open. Details of this and of the draft conference programme can be found at http://sall.exeter.ac.uk/research/conferences/reweavingtherainbow/

Any enquiries, please get in touch! k.hext@ex.ac.uk

Provisional Programme

Friday 10th September

11.00-12.30: Registration (Refreshments and a light lunch will be served)

12.30-12.45: Welcome

12.45-14.00: Keynote Speaker: Prof. Michael Wood (Princeton), Title TBC
Chair: Prof. Regenia Gagnier (Exeter)

14.00-14.30: Coffee/tea

14.30-16.00: Parallel Panels 1
A: Aesthetics
Thomas Karshan (Queen Mary, London), On Free Play in Literature and Aesthetics, 1850-1910
David Taylor (Roehampton), Art … A Priestly Function
Patricia Zakreski (Exeter), The Philosophy of Design and the Art of Fiction

B: Science
Andrew Mangham (Reading), Dickens, Medicine and the Philosophy of Science
Philipp Erchinger (Exeter), Knowing How to Guess: Darwin’s Hypotheses, Kepler’s Discoveries, and the Relationship between Science and Art
Louise Lee (King's College, London), 'A Mouth at the Top': Nonsense-world Physiognomy and the Respatialisation of the Face in Lewis Carroll and Charles Darwin

16.00-17.30: Parallel Panels 2
A: The Fin de Siècle
Regenia Gagnier (Exeter), Title TBC
Michael Bell (Warwick), Myth, Literature and Modernity: A Question of Priority
Sara Crangle (Sussex), Fin-de-Siècle Laughters

B: Form and Composition
Martin Simonson (University of the Basque Country), Henry David Thoreau and Edward Thomas: The Aesthetics of Walking
Demelza Hookway (Exeter), 'What John Stuart Mill Saw': Mona Caird’s Dialogue with Mill Cumhur Yılmaz Madran (Pamukkale University), Existentialism Displayed in Conrad’s Lord Jim

17.30-18.30: Wine Reception (kindly sponsored by Pirongs Educational Publishers)

19.30 onwards: Gala Dinner (Holland Hall, University of Exeter)

_________________________________________________________

Saturday 11th September

09.30-11.00: Parallel Panels 3
A: Poetry As Philosophy
Marion Thain (Birmingham), Phenomenology and Lyric Form
Karen Simecek (Warwick), The Experience of Poetry and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry
Nour Aweti (Leicester), The Poetical Philosophy of Constance Naden
Conor Carville (Reading) & Michael Halewood (Essex), Whitehead, Poetry and the Bifurcation of Nature

B: Philosophy through Fiction
David R. Sorensen (Saint Joseph's University), 'An Indefinable, Tentative Process': Carlyle, George Eliot, and the Redemption of Philosophy Through History and Fiction
Peter Rawlings (UWE), Henry James, What Maisie Knew, and Epistemology
Julian Wolfreys (Loughborough), Is There a Philosophy in This Text: Epistemological Countersignatures and Traces in Literature of the Nineteenth Century

11.00-12.30: Parallel Panels 4
A: Ralph Waldo Emerson and George Santayana
David M. Robinson (Oregon State), Emerson, Empiricism, and 'The Natural Method of Mental Philosophy'
David Greenham (UWE), Emerson Among The Philosophers
Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha), No More Barbaric Yawps: George Santayana and the Problem of Modern Poetry

B: Walter Pater: Rewriting Discourse and Identity
Kit Andrews (Western Oregon) The Essay as Philosophical-Literary Form: Pater’s Plato and Platonism
Adam Lee (Jesus College, Oxford) Platonism in Walter Pater’s The Renaissance
Sarah Townley (Nottingham). 'A Certain Kind of Temperament': Walter Pater and the Art of Individualism

12.30-13.30: Lunch

13.30-15.00: Parallel Panels 5
A: Dialogues with the Classics
Peter Faulkner (Exeter), Two Suicidal Philosophers in Victorian Poetry: Arnold’s Empedocles
and Tennyson’s Lucretius
Marylu Hill (Villanova), Socrates Gone Wilde: Socratic Reflections in the Wildean Mirror
Elizabeth Muller (University of Nantes), Yeats and the Pre-Socratic Philosophers

B: Dialogues with Idealism
Nathan Uglow (Leeds Trinity), Love Story: An Imperfect Account of a Victorian Concept
Sean McAlister (University of British Columbia), Poe's Interest/ Kant's Disinterest
Andrew Eastham (Independent Scholar), Bernard Bosanquet and the End of Hegelian
Aestheticism

15.00-15.30: Coffee/tea

15.30-17.00: Parallel Panels 6
A: The Quest for Truth
Jennifer Diann Jones (Independent Scholar), 'It is a Very Hard Thing to Say the Exact Truth': Feuerbach’s Influence on George Eliot's Concept of Realism
Kristen Renzi, (Indiana), Toward a Feminist Pragmatist Literary Analysis: The Uses of Pragmatism for Literary Studies
Frederik Van Dam (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Epistemology and Ethics in the Legal Novel: Anthony Trollope's Hermeneutics of Instinct

B: Friedrich Nietzsche
Thomas Greaves (UEA), Beyond Astonishment and Admiration: Nietzsche's Transformation of Wonder
Will Meakins (Essex) Carlyle and Nietzsche: Community and Scepticism
Nidesh Lawtoo (Lausanne) D. H. Lawrence and the Mimetic Dissolution of the Ego: From Nietzsche to Deleuze

17.00-17.30: Closing roundtable discussion

London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar - Photography Poems

2010-06-03T16:32:00.000Z

Institute of English Studies, University of London

Saturday 5th June 2010
Venue: The Court Room (Senate House, First Floor)
Time: 11:00 - 13:00

Topic: 'Photography' Poems. Led by Professor Isobel Armstrong (Birkbeck College).

7th June - update

2010-06-03T16:30:00.002Z

The Byatt reading is now in the Science and Literature Reading Group boxfile in the Whipple Library - both a copy of the book for reading in the library and a photocopy of the selected pages, which can be photocopied from by the main desk.

Call for papers - “Quit the road to ill-being”: Nineteenth-Century Ecocriticism

2010-06-03T08:44:00.000Z

42nd Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) April 7-10, 2011 New Brunswick, NJ – Hyatt New Brunswick Host Institution: Rutgers University

This panel invites ecocritical readings of and/or approaches to nature in nineteenth-century texts, particularly Victorian literature, or discussions of these authors as "environmentalists." The Romantics are better known for their ecological consciousness, but this panel investigates Victorian attitudes: How did they relate to the non-human? How did they react to the impact of industry? I am interested in "against the grain" readings - rather than nature poetry, discussions of novelists like Austen and Scott, or Victorian authors engaging with urban spaces or transforming landscapes would be thought-provoking. How might we expand our concept of "nature" writing? Papers might consider dualisms (nature/culture, country/city); pollution or toxic discourse; or ecological communities that embrace the non-human. How do these readings shed light on our current climate crisis?

Please e-mail abstracts of 250-500 words by September 30, 2010, to Margaret Wright, mswright@ic.sunysb.edu.

Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable. If your abstract is accepted, do not confirm your participation if you may cancel for another NeMLA session.

Approved NeMLA sessions are now listed online and accepting abstracts: http://www.nemla.org/convention/2011/cfp.html

These 370 sessions cover the full spectrum of scholarly and teaching interests in the modern languages.

7th June

2010-06-01T13:33:00.003Z

Skillicorn Room, Homerton College, 7.30-9pm

For our last meeting of the year, we are no longer going to hold a creative-writing workshop; rather, a more relaxed end-of-term evening of conversation over a glass of wine or two. If you'd like to read something, then do have a look at the mock-Victorian insect fairy-tale, ‘Things Are Not What They Seem', from A.S. Byatt's ‘Morpho Eugenia’, Angels and Insects (1992). Let me know if you need a copy of this.

All welcome!

Society for the History of Medieval Technology and Science - Talk

2010-06-01T13:22:00.000Z

“Mapping Paradise”: an illustrated talk by Alessandro Scafi.
Saturday, 12 June at 2:30 pm at the Museum of the History of Science, Broad Street, Oxford.

BSHS Perspectives on Science Essay Prize 2010

2010-06-01T09:54:00.002Z

The British Society for the History of Science would like to announce our first annual student essay competition for school and college pupils. The competition is designed primarily for students completing the Perspectives on Science course, however students from any other related subject are also encouraged to apply. Eligible essays will focus on any aspect of the history of science, or have a strong historical element as background to a more contemporary scientific topic. A prize of £50 will be awarded to the winning candidate, and the winning essay will be published on our website http://www.bshs.org.uk/outreach.

Entries must be between 5,000 and 7,000 words long and will be judged on the following criteria:

Critical use of a wide range of sources
Accuracy and relevance of historical content
Quality of written communication

To nominate a student, please send an electronic copy of their essay along with their name, school/college and age to outreach@bshs.org.uk. Candidates must be under the age of 19 and still be in (or about to finish) full time secondary or further education by the submission date. The deadline for submissions is 30th July 2010. There is no limit to the number of entries from a single institution and candidates may nominate themselves if they wish.

For more information about the BSHS and what we do, please visit our website http://www.bshs.org.uk

Great Exhibitions!

2010-06-01T09:37:00.000Z

The British Society for the History of Science is pleased to announce a new competition for public exhibitions that deal with the history of science and/or medicine.

Entries are welcome from institutions in any country and exhibits may be permanent or temporary. Eligible exhibits must use artefacts or places of some kind and this may include buildings or locations, pictures, instruments, objects and books. Web-exhibits are eligible for the prize. The closing date is the 15th September 2010 and exhibits should still be available for viewing until the end of November 2010. The prize is £300. The winning exhibit will be the subject of a special feature in the BSHS’s Viewpoint magazine. Entrants need to fill in a entrance for and this and further details are available from http://www.bshs.org.uk/outreach-and-education/competition-announcements/great-exhibitions

Enquries to outreach@bshs.org.uk

Two One-Year Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Nineteenth-Century Studies (any discipline)

2010-06-01T09:35:00.000Z

Faculty of Classics Vacancy Reference No: GE06658. Salary £27,319 for the year.

The Cambridge Victorian Studies Group of Cambridge University, in association with the Leverhulme Trust, intends to appoint two Research Fellows for one year from 1 October 2010 to work on its project, 'Past vs. Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress'. Those working on any relevant aspect of 19th-century British culture, including but not limited to History of Science, History, Theology, Classical Tradition, Egyptology, Literature, Cultural Studies, Music, Archaeology, Art, Museology, are invited to apply. Candidates may be at any stage in their academic career but must have submitted a PhD before October 2010.

Further details and an application form, CHRIS 6 (please only complete Parts1 and 3), can be obtained from Carolyn Bartley, Faculty of Classics,Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA, or from cb520@cam.ac.uk. Completed applications should be sent to the same address by Friday June 18th.

Applications should include a covering letter, the completed CHRIS 6 form, a detailed curriculum vitae, including a list of publications, a writing=20 sample, and a statement of research, which should be no longer than 2,000 words. Please quote the vacancy reference number on all correspondence.

Closing date: 18 June 2010. Interview date: 20 July 2010.

The University values diversity and is committed to equality of opportunity. The University has a responsibility to ensure that all employees are eligible to live and work in the UK.

Further details are at the current jobs listings on the University of Cambridge webpages: http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/hr/jobs/vacancies.cgi?job=6658

Professor Dame Gillian Beer, "Darwin and the Descent of Woman"

2010-05-21T11:54:00.000Z

Respondent: Professor Juliet Mitchell
Chair: Professor Jim Secord

Weds 2 June 2010, 5.00pm to 6.30pm
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge

All Welcome: Free Entrance and a glass of wine

Sponsored by the Centre for Gender Studies and the Darwin Correspondence Project

American Book Center, Amsterdam

2010-05-20T11:35:00.003Z

With thanks to Jenny Rampling...

24th May - Water

2010-05-18T09:42:00.002Z

We meet once more from 7.30-9pm in the Skillicorn Room at Homerton College; a modified reading list is below. If you have trouble accessing the second reading then let me know and I can email you a pdf document.

All welcome!

1.'The Drop of Water’, Hans Christian Andersen (1848)

2. ‘The Water-Drops: A Fairy Tale’, [Henry Morley], Household Words, 17 August 1850, pp. 482-9. [.cam domain]

3. 'Water Bewitched’, John Cargill Brough, The Fairy-Tales of Science (1859).

4. ‘A Drop of Water on Its Travels’, Arabella Buckley, The Fairyland of Science (1879).

17th May - Insects

2010-05-11T07:30:00.002Z

We meet, as usual, from 7.30-9pm in the Skillicorn Room at Homerton College. The modified reading list is all online, with links below:

‘The Fresh-Water Siren’, ‘Acheta Domestica’ [L. M. Budgen], Episodes of Insect Life (1849), vol. I, chapter 9.

‘A Lesson of Faith’ and ‘Knowledge not the Limit of Belief’, Margaret Gatty, Parables From Nature (1855-)

‘Metamorphoses’, John Cargill Brough, The Fairy-Tales of Science (1859)

All welcome!

LitSciMed - Event 3

2010-05-10T13:57:00.000Z

Applications are now open for the third event in the AHRC-funded 'Theories and Methods: Literature, Science and Medicine' training programme (www.litscimed.org.uk). The event will take place 1-2 July 2010 hosted by the Royal Institution of Great Britain and the National Maritime Museum, in London.

Day 1: Using History of Science Archives (Royal Institution of Great Britain).

Day 2: Exploring Science, Literature and Objects (National Maritime Museum).

There will be twenty funded places given to doctoral students for this training event. Bursaries are available for travel/subsistence and accommodation.

Applications must be submitted by 1 June 2010 (forms and a provisional programme are available at http://litscimed.org.uk/page/event3).We hope to confirm places by Tuesday 8th June 2010.

Fifteenth Annual Hans Rausing Lecture

2010-05-10T07:22:00.002Z

From scientific instruments to musical instruments: The tuning fork, metronome and siren
Professor Myles W. Jackson

Thursday 27 May 2010 at 4.30pm
McCrum Lecture Theatre, Bene't Street, Cambridge
Public lecture – all welcome

Myles W. Jackson is the Dibner Family Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and the Gallatin School of New York University.

My talk analyzes how nineteenth-century acoustical instruments meant to standardize musical performance and measure various dimensions of sound, such as pitch and beat, were a century later put to use as musical instruments themselves. Metronomes (and their predecessors, the chronometer) and tuning forks migrated from bourgeois households and rehearsal halls to physics and physiological laboratories and then back to concert halls, where they were the primary instruments of a number of twentieth-century compositions. Similarly, sirens, another instrument employed by nineteenth-century acousticians for determining accurately musical pitch, were heard with increasing frequency in the twentieth-century musical halls of New York, Berlin, and Paris. Drawing upon a material cultural history of science and technology, this lecture will trace how these objects were redefined by their new roles as the generators, rather than the quantifiers, of musical qualities, by exploring both the use of mechanical apparatus to standardize critical aspects of early nineteenth-century music and the resulting debates surrounding what such standardization meant to the art. Did these machines hinder or enhance expression and creative genius? Could they thwart the attempts of virtuosi to take liberties with the composer's original intentions? Twentieth-century composers, such as Györgi Ligeti, Edgard Varèse, and Warren Burt, used these same acoustical instruments to subvert the very notions they were created to define and reinforce.

Dickens and Science - new issue of 19

2010-05-05T20:51:00.000Z

The latest issue of Birkbeck's online journal 19, guest edited by Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard, explores Dickens’s myriad engagements with science, including medicine, psychology, forensics, evolutionary thought, palaeontology, ecology, and contested practices such as mesmerism. Participating in the lively revision of earlier accounts of Dickens’s failure to understand and respond to science, this special issue places Dickens at the heart of a peculiarly Victorian, deeply literary, appreciation of the imaginative potential of scientific discovery.

See here for the table of contents, and link to the articles.

10th May - Stars

2010-04-20T10:46:00.001Z

We begin our exploration of the fairy-tales of science by travelling to the stars. All of this week's readings are available online at the links below. We meet from 7.30-9pm in the Skillicorn Room at Homerton College: this is in the Ibberson Building on this map. I will be at the porter's lodge at 7.20 should anyone prefer to meet there instead. All welcome!

General Introductory Reading

Arabella Buckley, The Fairyland of Science (1879), lecture 1.

Readings for 10^th May

‘A Flight Through Space’, John Cargill Brough, The Fairy-Tales of Science (1859).

‘Training the Pole-Star’, and ‘The Tail of a Comet’, Elizabeth W. Champney, In the Sky-Garden (1877).

‘Sunbeams and the work they do’, Arabella Buckley, The Fairyland of Science (1879), lecture 2.

‘The Magician’s Chamber by Moonlight’, Arabella Buckley, Through Magic Glasses (1890).

Oxford Literature and Science Seminar, April-May 2010

2010-04-17T17:09:00.002Z

University of Oxford
Faculty of English Language and Literature
Literature and Science Seminar
Please note the different days, times, and venues for each week’s session

Professor Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford), ‘Childhood Sexuality and the Victorian Novel.’
Friday 30 April 2010, 3.30pm.
English Faculty, St Cross Building, Room 10.

Professor Bruno Latour (Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris), ‘A Compositionist Manifesto.’
Wednesday 12 May 2010, 5.30pm.
English Faculty, St Cross Building, Lecture Theatre 2.

Graduate Forum: Stella Pratt-Smith (University of Oxford), ‘Mind over Matter: From Sensation to Precision in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Electricity’.
Will Tattersdill (King’s College, London), ‘Two Sides of the Same Page: Science and Fiction in the Late Victorian Periodical.’
Friday 28 May 2010, 2pm.
English Faculty, St Cross Building, Room 10.

Convenors: Dr Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and Dr Michael Whitworth
http://oxford-lit-and-science.blogspot.com/

Event - Ian McEwan at Royal Society of Literature

2010-04-17T17:08:00.000Z

Monday 10th May, 7pm, Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, Courtauld Institute, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA

Originality in science is synonymous with being first; originality in the arts is somewhat different. At what point do these two creative endeavours overlap? Ian McEwan is a novelist who has often taken science as a subject: Enduring Love was about a science writer, Saturday about a brain surgeon. His latest novel, Solar, is about global warming and its protagonist is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has given up original work to enjoy his own celebrity. McEwan’s first book, the short stories First Love, Last Rites, was hailed for ‘an originality astonishing for a young man still in his twenties’. Yet original work by scientists is most often achieved while they are still young: do they develop differently? Richard Fortey’s original work is on fossils. He is a research palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum whose books include Trilobite!, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and Earth: an intimate history. A Fellow both of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a former President of the Geological Society of London.
This event is free for Fellows and Members of the Royal Society of Literature. There are a limited number of tickets available for members of the public at all RSL events. These are sold at the door, from 6pm, on a first-come-first-served basis. We suggest a contribution of £7 (£5 concession). For further information please visit our website http://www.rslit.org, or call us on 02078454676.

BSLS Book Prize - Announcement

2010-04-17T17:06:00.001Z

The British Society for Literature and Science book prize for the best book in the field of literature and science published in 2009 has been awarded to Leah Knight for Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (Ashgate).

Play - The Alchemist

2010-04-14T14:22:00.002Z

The Alchemist is on at the ADC next week - a few Science and Literature people are going to see it on Wednesday 21st, if anyone else wants to join us? Further details (and tickets) here.

The Marlowe Society presentsThe Alchemist
by Ben Jonson
Tuesday 20th April - Saturday 24th April
£9-£6

The world famous Marlowe Society return to the ADC Theatre to bring to life Jonson’s finest
masterpiece.

Living in a stolen house, Face, Subtle and Doll Common are making themselves a fortune.

Imagine a London where the desire for money (as well as certain other vices) drives individuals to believe the most outrageous things. Imagine a London where this indulgent philosophy leads its residents into farcical and extraordinary situations.
Jonson wrote The Alchemist to satirize the London of his time but his precise and
enlightened depiction of humanity remains scarily relevant today.

Our three ‘heroes’ are master con-artists. Employing a spectacular array of characters and costumes they entice, seduce, befuddle and hustle their way through Jonson’s most colorful and eclectic collection of characters with hilarious results. The Alchemist is often thought of as one of the greatest comedies of all time and the Marlowe Society’s 2010 production supports this in every possible way.

If laughter is what you need then head back 400 years and see London for how it really was... or is. Full of the funniest fools one could ever imagine. The con is on!

Conference - Comics and Medicine: Medical Narratives in Graphic Novels

2010-04-13T11:48:00.001Z

17th June 2010, School of Advanced Study, Institute of English Studies, University of London

For further details of the speakers and to register see here.

Periodic Table of Typefaces

2010-04-13T09:44:00.000Z

New online resources

2010-04-12T11:55:00.001Z

A selection of things recently brought to my attention:

1. The Science Museum's Brought to Life website:

The Science Museum’s new history of medicine website has now been completed. In all it now present 4000 new images of artefacts from the collections linked to 16 specialised themes on medicine across time, written by staff and other professional historians of medicine. Each theme is associated with bibliographies and interactives suitable for teaching at several levels.
The themes are:
Belief and medicine; Birth and death; Controversies and medicine; Diagnosis; Diseases and epidemics; Hospitals;Mental health and illness; Practising medicine; Public health;Science and medicine; Surgery;Technology and medicine; Medical traditions;Treatments and cures; Understanding the body; War and medicine
Under a creative commons policy the images are available for download.

2. The New Light on Old Bones project:

New Light on Old Bones (NLOB) is an innovative, multi-disciplinary research project looking at the cultural, social, and historical context of natural science collections in two venues in North West England; Blackburn Museum, and Rossendale Museum.
The lead researcher is Mark Steadman, and the project board consists of Dr Samuel Alberti of The Manchester Museum, and David Craven and Dr Myna Trustram from Renaissance North West.
The project aims to provide museums with a toolkit of methods they can use to better interpret their collections.

3. The Victorianist blog:

The postgraduate website for BAVS.

4. Wellcome Medicine and Literature Guide

Includes details of how to research medicine and literature in the Wellcome Trust collections, and of online medicine and literature resources.

Easter Term 2010

2010-04-05T18:31:00.006Z

This term we will focus on the fairy-tales of science, reading a selection of nineteenth-century works that combined new discoveries with the myths and legends of old. We meet on Mondays from 7.30-9pm in the Skillicorn Room at Homerton College: please note our new venue, and the rather irregular scheduling due to the May bank holidays. Readings will be made available in photocopied packs in the Whipple Library and Homerton library from the beginning of term, and many of the selections we have chosen are also online (links below). Organised by Daniel Friesner (Science Museum) and Melanie Keene (Homerton College). See our blog for news and updates; email Melanie to join our dedicated mailing list. All welcome!

General Introductory Reading

Arabella Buckley, The Fairyland of Science (1879), lecture 1.

10^th May – Stars

‘A Flight Through Space’, John Cargill Brough, The Fairy-Tales of Science (1859).

‘Training the Pole-Star’, and ‘The Tail of a Comet’, Elizabeth W. Champney, In the Sky-Garden (1877).

‘Sunbeams and the work they do’, Arabella Buckley, The Fairyland of Science (1879), lecture 2.

‘The Magician’s Chamber by Moonlight’, Arabella Buckley, Through Magic Glasses (1890).

17^th May – Insects

‘The Fresh-Water Siren’, ‘Acheta Domestica’ [L. M. Budgen], Episodes of Insect Life (1849), vol. I, chapter 9.

‘A Lesson of Faith’ and ‘Knowledge not the Limit of Belief’, Margaret Gatty, Parables From Nature (1855-)

‘Metamorphoses’, John Cargill Brough, The Fairy-Tales of Science (1859)

‘A.L.O.E.’ [C. M. Tucker], Fairy Frisket; or, Peeps at Insect Life (1874), chapters 10-11.

24^th May - Water

‘The Drop of Water’, Hans Christian Andersen (1848)

‘The Water-Drops: A Fairy Tale’, [Henry Morley], Household Words, 17 August 1850, pp. 482-9. [.cam domain]

‘Water Bewitched’, John Cargill Brough, The Fairy-Tales of Science (1859).

‘The Autobiography of a Drop of Water’, Annie Carey, Autobiographies... (1870).

‘A Drop of Water on Its Travels’, Arabella Buckley, The Fairyland of Science (1879).

7^th June

‘Things Are Not What They Seem’, ‘Matty Crompton’ [A.S. Byatt], from ‘Morpho Eugenia’, Angels and Insects (1992).

CFP - Copernicus and his International Reception

2010-04-05T11:19:00.001Z

Copernicus's theories did not enter the scene of European thought (science and theology) without dispute. This volume of Intersections will concentrate on the debates it triggered and it is specifically dedicated to two aspects of the international reception of Copernicus:

1) the reception and criticism of Copernican theories in astronomy, philosophy, religion, art history, and early modern literature;

2) the biographical, literary, artistic representation and ideological appropriation of 'Copernicus the man'.

Among the main questions will be:

Ad 1) Why did Copernicus leave an open flank in this theories by numerous mathematical imprecisions and how did physics cope with this deficit? Did the pluralisation of the worlds give change to the diagrammatical representation of world models? By which temporal shifts did the various arts react to the Copernican model? Did the metaphorical language of the areas concerned change (the heavens, planets, satellites)? Was there a change in the position of the mythological figures in pictorial arts? Were there new allegories? How did the iconography of the heavens change? Is there a difference in the ways Catholicism and Protestantism reacted to Copernicus? What was Copernicus's influence on the utopian literature?

Ad 2) By which processes in early modern European science and literature did Copernicus and his theory become a pan-European point of reference within the history of knowledge and how was he re-nationalised in historiography and literature after the early modern period? How did this nationalist and/or ideological
appropriation of Copernicus come about (e.g. the reception of Copernicus in socialist societies)? What kind of reception is reflected in the various monuments and images of Copernicus?

INTERSECTIONS brings together new material on well considered themes within the wide area of Early Modern Studies. Contributions may come from any of the disciplines within the humanities. The themes are directed towards hitherto little explored areas or reflect a lively debate within the international community of scholars.

This volume will be edited by Thomas Rahn, Wolfgang Neuber, and is scheduled to appear in 2012. Proposals, about 300 words in length, should be sent (electronically) no later than September 1st 2010,
either to: Thomas Rahn trahn@zedat.fu-berlin.de or Wolfgang Neuber neuber@zedat.fu-berlin.de or Claus Zittel zittel@khi.fi.it

Centre for Material Texts - Inaugural Conference

2010-03-30T07:18:00.000Z

5-6 April 2010, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

Programme and booking forms for the Centre's inaugural conference are now available to download from the website (http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=389#more-389).

With contributions from leading international scholars and current postgraduate students from a variety of disciplines, the conference will explore a kaleidoscopic array of current approaches to many kinds of material text. Among the topics to be addressed are: maps from the middle ages to the Ordnance Survey; material modernism; literary decisions and revisions; the materiality (or not) of film; writers' remains and their conservation; music, sound and urban space; the future of reading in the digital age; the printed image; publishing after death; border crossings in the history of the book; the current state of editing; and the relationship between writing and memory.

We are delighted to welcome Leah Price (Harvard) and Peter Stallybrass (Penn) as our plenary speakers. Other speakers include: Ardis Butterfield (UCL), Chris Cannon (NYU), Paul Chirico (Cambridge), Ian Christie (Birkbeck), Flora Dennis (Sussex), Juliet Fleming (New York), Heather Glen (Cambridge), Hugh Haughton (York), Rachel Hewitt (Queen Mary), Alfred Hiatt (Queen Mary), Sachiko Kusukawa (Cambridge), Samantha Matthews (Sheffield), David McKitterick (Cambridge), Molly Murray (Columbia), Robin Schulze (Penn State), Sujit Sivasundaram (LSE), Andrew Thacker (De Montfort), David Trotter (Cambridge), Patrick Wildgust (Shandy Hall), Abigail Williams (Oxford), Henry Woudhuysen (UCL) and Andrew Zurcher (Cambridge).

The conference fee is £35/£20 (unwaged). A number of bursaries, kindly sponsored by AMARC, are available for unwaged graduate students. Numbers are limited: please book early to avoid disappointment.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

2010-03-24T08:31:00.004Z

CFP - The Life and Work of Jane Webb Loudon

2010-03-20T13:46:00.000Z

Women & Science in the Nineteenth-Century: Science Fiction and Science Education

Leeds Trinity University College 27th-28th June 2011

Jane Webb Loudon (1807-1858) is a neglected figure of interest to a range of research areas including women’s professional writing, the promotion of science and women’s education and speculative fiction. She is best known for The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) and Gardening for Ladies (1840). The conference intends to explore the life, work and example of Jane Webb Loudon in the context of women and science in the nineteenth century. It therefore seeks papers from various disciplinary perspectives on fictional and non-fictional contributions by women to the formation of popular scientific awareness during the nineteenth century.

We welcome proposals for contributions on the following topics:
Women’s Science Fiction Victorian Science Fiction Women & Scientific Research
Popular Science Jane Webb Loudon’s Circle Women’s Magazines Visualising Social Change Botany and Horticulture Children’s EducationWomen’s positions and voices within late Victorian science fiction 1850-1910 Nineteenth-century speculative writing Science & Social Reform Scientific Writing & the Periodical Press Class & Entry to the Professions Women’s Education and Science in Popular Fiction Women’s Gardening Vivisection Represented in Women’s Writing Gender debates in Science Fiction

Keynote speakers, Matthew Beaumont, Alan Rauch, Andy Sawyer, Ann B. Shteir

CFP - Poetry and Melancholia

2010-03-20T13:34:00.000Z

University of Stirling, 8-10 July 2011

Keynote speakers: Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, University of London), Don Paterson (Poet), and Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton University). Other speakers include John Drakakis (Stirling University), Lorna Hutson (University of St Andrews), Ron Levao (Rutgers University), Cornelia D. J. Pearsall (Smith College) and David G. Riede (Ohio State University)

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the nature and representation of melancholia within poetry and its relationship to poetics and poetic creation from the Renaissance to the present. Drawing together contributors from Art History, Literature, Medical Humanities, Philosophy, and Print Media, Poetry and Melancholia will try to examine the variety of forms that melancholia has historically taken and extend its meaning beyond the social, medical and epistemological norms that had framed it as a sign of mental illness or a way of behaving to that of a cultural idea. We aim to define not only the different configurations and significance of melancholia as mood, feeling, state of mind, and a cultural outlook but also the role that modernity has played in its development from a medical discourse to a dispositional perspective.

Themes: Aesthetics: the sublime, art and longing, decadence, narcissism and loss, revelations of destruction, degeneration, eroticism, melancholy genius, nostalgia, spleen, the states of boredom

Affect: sensibility, solitude and alienation, despair, grief, suffering and sadness, distorted senses, mood as language, psychology, transference, the workings of sympathy, haunting and return

Biomedical sciences: clinical depression, malady, delirium, humors, mental derangement, physiology and pathologies of the mind, psychoanalytic workings of mourning, somatic conditions

Nature, Space, and Landscape: landscape and distance, the resistance of physical objects, conflicts with nature, interior distance and phenomenology

Poetics: creativity, idleness and labour, imagination, inspiration and delirium, the politics of form and genre (allegory, elegy, lyric, and pastoral, etc.), poetry's relation to the visual and plastic arts

Tradition and History: appropriations of classical theories of melancholia, the idea of tainted inheritance, the traditions of witchcraft and the demonic, the past as loss, writing and memory

Sociology: alienation, anomalies of self-consciousness and the will, fragmentation and conflicts of modernity, otherness, gender, class, race, sexuality, social role of the poet, suicide

Please submit 300 word abstracts for 20 minute papers or proposals for panels together with a short biographical note or CV to Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and David Miller at poetryandmelancholia@stir.ac.uk by no later than 15 January 2011.

CFP - Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2010

2010-03-17T14:04:00.002Z

Diverse Engagement: Drawing in the Margins

Do you work at the juncture of different disciplines?
Does your work challenge dominant research paradigms in your field?
Does doodling in the margins get your creative juices flowing?
Does your research involve marginalised groups?
How does your research apply to the wider community?

The theme of this year's conference reflects how research can take place in or across the margins of academic work. This conference seeks to investigate how one's work may interact with, challenge, influence, or involve the margins of different disciplines, paradigms, groups or individual practice. Drawing in the margins should be interpreted broadly as the focus of all areas of academic scholarship; this is intended to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of postgraduate work.

The IGC Committee welcomes papers from graduate researchers across all disciplines.

Abstract submission: please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words via the conference website www.igc2010.co.uk before April 18th 2010.

Dates for next term

2010-03-15T17:47:00.001Z

Next term's readings on Fairy-Tales are in preparation: watch this space! Meanwhile, here are the dates for your diaries (due to bank holidays and things we've having a run of three meetings and then a creative-writing workshop): Mondays 10th, 17th, 24th May; and 7th June, from 7.30-9pm. We're also going to be meeting in a new venue: the Skillicorn Room at Homerton College.

Literary Engineering Workshop

2010-03-15T17:22:00.001Z

Humanity Manse, College Bounds
University of Aberdeen

10 am – 5.15 pm Wednesday 17 March 2010

Organizers: Casper Andersen (Aarhus) and Ben Marsden (Aberdeen)

In association with the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy

Speakers for this workshop include:

Casper Andersen (University of Aarhus): ‘Engineering journalists and the British Empire 1890-1930: The case of Stafford Ransome’

Mike Chrimes (Institution of Civil Engineers, London) ‘Aspects of the literary output of British engineers in the nineteenth century ‘

Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds) ‘Righting wrongs and re-writing rights: Oliver Lodge & Silvanus Thompson’s alternative narratives of electrical invention’

Chris Macleod (University of Bristol) ‘Authorship, intellectual property and British aeronautical engineering in the early twentieth century’

Ben Marsden (University of Aberdeen) ‘Re-reading Brunel: cultures of reading and writing in early nineteenth-century engineering’

Frances Robertson (Glasgow School of Art) ‘William Johnson (1823-1864) and the “world of industrial readers”’

Chair / commentator:
Don Leggett (University of Kent)
Ralph O’Connor (University of Aberdeen)
Klaus Staubermann (National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh)

For further details, and if you wish to attend (places may be limited), please contact: Ben Marsden (b.marsden@abdn.ac.uk).

BSLS book prize 2010

2010-03-10T16:06:00.001Z

The following books have been shortlisted for the British Society for Literature and Science prize for the best book in the field of literature and science published in 2009:

Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Harvard University Press)
Leah Knight, Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (Ashgate, Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)
Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Palgrave Macmillan)
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (University of Wales Press, Gothic Literary Studies)

Reviews of a number of these books are currently available on the reviews pages of the BSLS website. The prize itself will be announced at the BSLS conference in April.

REMINDER: Register for the BSLS conference by 15th March. Details here.

National Science and Engineering Week Haiku Challenge

2010-03-05T14:34:00.000Z

Joanna Rooke writes:

As you know, it's National Science and Engineering Week in seven days time...yey!

We're always talking about outreach and expanding our audiences, but I wanted to do a bit of "inreach" for the Week. Many of you will be planning events and activities but there may be some of you out there in psci-com land who feel a little bit left out - and I don't want that.

To get everyone involved and in the mood, I'm throwing down the gauntlet to create the best National Science and Engineering Week haiku - this could be about the week as a whole, one of the projects, your own event or anything around the general topic. All entries should be sent to nsew@britishscienceassociation.org and the deadline for entries is the first day of NSEW (next Friday 12th March) at 5pm. The winner will get a NSEW t-shirt and the glory of being master haiku creator.

For those who don't know: A haiku is a non-rhymed verse genre. There are 5 syllables in the first sentence, 7 in the second and 5 again in the last sentence

Visit www.nsew.org.uk for inspiration.

My (admittedly feeble) contribution is:

Big Bangs and Small Bugs
Hands on fun in the UK
I love Science Week!

Cambridge Wordfest 2010

2010-03-02T16:50:00.002Z

Ticket booking is now open for the 2010 Cambridge Wordfest, which will take place from 9-11th April. Further information here.

Colloquim - The Cultural Impact of Darwin and Darwinism in Europe

2010-03-02T15:44:00.002Z

A one-day Colloquium on the Cultural Impact of Darwin and Darwinism in Europe will be held at Clare Hall, Cambridge, on Friday 12 March 2010, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Organized by the Research Project on the Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, the Colloquium will consist of a series of 15-minute papers followed by short discussion and builds on the success of last year's Darwin in Europe Colloquium at Christ's College. The event will act as a forum for contributions to a third volume of The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, focusing on Darwin's cultural and literary reception.

The range of topics and speakers include:

Philip Ajouri (Stuttgart) 'Darwinist Weltanschauung: Literature and Science in Germany'
Tom Glick (Boston) 'Unamuno's Hair Shirt: The 1909 Darwin Centennial in Valencia'
Peter Kjaergaard (Cambridge & Aarhus) 'Jacobsen and the First Danish Translation and Literary Response'
Eduard Kolchinsky (St Petersburg) 'Darwin's Centenaries in Russia: 1909, 1959 and 2009'
Travis Landry (Kenyon, Ohio) 'Selection in Relation to Sex and the Spanish Literary Imagination'
Patricia da Silva McNeill (King's, London) and Pedro Fonseca (Coimbra) 'The Portuguese "Generation of the 1870s": Eça de Queiroz in England'
Donald Rayfield (Queen Mary) 'Darwin and Russian Writers: Chekhov and Mandelstam'
Daniel Schuemann (Bamberg) 'Darwinism = Hamletism? Sienkiewicz's futile Crusade against Polish Positivism'
Elinor Shaffer (Cambridge & London) 'Darwin's reception in the literary magazine Revue des Deux Mondes'
Katalin Straner (Budapest) 'Darwinism and Literary Culture in Late Nineteenth-century Hungary'
Paul White (Cambridge) 'Darwin's correspondence and sentimental culture'

Registration costs £35 (£30 in advance); £15 for students.
For further details and to register (space is limited) please contact the Project Office: RBAE@fsmail.net <mailto:RBAE@fsmail.net>

The Research Project: The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe
Director: Dr Elinor Shaffer FBA

12B Ridgmount Gardens
London WC1E 7AR
UK
Tel. & fax no. +44 (0)20 7323 6861
http://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/RBAE

Cambridge Science Festival 2010

2010-03-02T15:42:00.000Z

8-21 March 2010 as part of National Science and Engineering Week.

Full programme online at: http://www.cambridgescience.org or please call 01223 766766 to request a hard copy.

Join us for the UK's largest free science festival, exploring subjects from astronomy to zoology, with demonstrations, hands on experiments, talks from leading scientists, and visits to University and partner facilities. Over 170 free events will give families, adults and children of all ages two weeks of hands on science and insight into the University's cutting edge research. Many of the hands on activities, demonstrations and children's lectures will take place on our family fun days on Saturday 13 and 20 March. Many events below are drop in, but do visit the website to check if any you are interested in require pre-booking.

Highlights for adults include:

The Price of Extinction: what losing biodiversity costs, with William Kendall, chief executive of Green & Blacks chocolate, Bill Adams, Hazell Thompson and more, 10 March
Muza Gondwe, showing African science heroes film, 11 March
David Spiegelhalter, on the public understanding of risk, 12 March
Simon Wessely, researcher on military health, gulf war syndrome, PTSD, speaking on 'From the Blitz to Bin Laden: responses to adversity', 15 March
Ehsan Masood, author of Science and Islam, speaking 17 March
Discover the science of humour with psychologist Richard Wiseman on 18 March as he describes his year-long search for the world's funniest joke
Jason Rentfrow, social psychologist involved in BBC Big Personality Test, speaking 19 March
Join specialist science guides on the Daring Diversity walking tour to discover why Newton poked a needle in his eye and why Darwin's nickname was 'Gas'

Highlights for families include:

Hands on activities in Colourful Creatures at the Museum of Zoology
Learn what happens when lasers and jam doughnuts collide with Dr Evil
Discover the world of waves, gases and chemistry with The Naked Scientists as they detonate bombs, electrocute vegetables, and turn air into a liquid!

Ian McEwan - The Use of Poetry

2010-03-01T23:14:00.003Z

In the New Yorker here.

Square Rounds

2010-03-01T23:08:00.000Z

38 Plays: 38 Days

2010-02-26T10:27:00.000Z

What

Starting on the 1st of March, we intend to read each of Shakespeare’s 38 plays in 38 days*.
We would love your company. You are warmly invited to join us in this reading challenge.
Even if you don’t have time for quite so much reading, feel free to invent your own Shakespeare challenge. Your moral support, Shakespeare knowledge or idle thoughts would be invaluable.
* Plus a bonus day for Edward III.

When

1 March – 7 April 2010
8 April 2010 is a bonus day reserved for Edward III

Where

We are an online collective.
The blog is updated daily.
Our Facebook group is here.
The forum is here.

Why

I’ve always wanted to read all of Shakespeare’s plays. Somehow, I’ve managed to get through my life so far without having done so. Starting on the 1st of March, I intend to rectify this sorry state of affairs.
After participating in NaNoWriMo and ScriptFrenzy in 2009, I realised two things. First, I enjoy wild, crazy, nigh-impossible challenges. Second, working toward a goal alongside other people is a great source of motivation.
We’re not going for great scholarly insight or serious, critical readings. The point of this madcap adventure is to have fun and get through a first reading of the plays.

If you feel inclined to join us in reading an awful lot of Shakespeare awfully quickly, we’d love your company!

Contact Ingrid Jendrzejewski for more information.

CFP - Poetries and sciences in the 21st century

2010-02-25T18:37:00.000Z

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (www.isr-journal.org)
This is to invite proposals for contributions to a themed issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews on the topic of "Poetries and sciences in the 21st Century", to be published as volume 37, number 2, June 2012.

Reference here to the present century is meant to imply that the relationship between poetry and science is historically contingent and that our current views of it are informed and challenged by those of the past. The intended aim of this issue, then, is not so much to say or even to sketch what we believe to be true as to question our views by considering where they come from, both in the present and in the past, and to speculate on what is to be done.

As a point of departure, consider the literary critic I. A. Richards' Poetries and Sciences, a work whose writing and revisions span the middle half of the 20th Century. In his book, which bears the marks of considerable struggle and disagreement, Richards asked what poetry could be in a world deeply and broadly
affected by technoscience. The revolution it has brought about, he argued, is "too drastic to be met by any such half-measures" as promotion of wonder in the marvels of nature (1970: 52-3). What could wonder be but an attitude of ignorance when these marvels have or are assumed to have lawlike explanation? Science has neutralized nature, he argued, and so deprived poetry of its original well-spring, "the Magical View of the world" (1970: 50). What could a poet say to those for whom making sense ultimately requires the radically plain style of scientific reasoning? His solution was to cut the language of imagination free from the language of belief, hence from epistemological certainty, implying our philosophical freedom to explore possible worlds.

Consider also the psychologist Jerome Bruner's essay "Possible Castles", in his Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986). Here Bruner argues that philosophical questioning of science (by Thomas Kuhn et al.) has reawakened the ancient, even tired question of the "two cultures" by revealing science itself to be historically contingent. In response to this reawakening he gives us two opposed trajectories for the sciences and the humanities. Both originate in curiosity and speculation about the world, but the one moves steadily away from ambiguity while the other moves toward increasing "the alternativeness of human possibility" (Bruner 1986: 53). He concludes his essay by quoting Aristotle on the poet's function: "to describe not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen" (Poetics II.9). What matters to the poet, Bruner says, is verisimilitude to conceivable human experience. The poet's job, we might say, is to expand what is conceivable by finding the right words, whereas the scientist's is to extend what is explicable by equally
audacious but differently directed acts of imagination.

Much closer to our time, enter into the debate physicist Robert B. Laughlin's declaration that as much in physics as in biology we have come out of the reductionism which defined science throughout the 20th Century (2005: 208) - and so created Richards' dilemma - into an Age of Emergence. If so, then the question to be rescued from the muddle of "two cultures" is truly vigorous and contemporary. Let us say that, to quote theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, we foreswear the crippling mental habit "of looking only downward toward subsystems, and never upward and outward" (2000: 2), which renders us unable to see emergent organizational principles, of poetry or of life itself. What then might poetry and science have to do with each other? What might that preeminent expression of technoscience, computing, have to say about poetry, and how might it go about the saying? How might our most adventurous theories of poetic discourse inform a computing that works "upward and outward" from its object of study?

Practical matters
All contributions will be peer-reviewed. Articles may contain black-and-white illustrations (for which authors should seek any necessary permissions). Articles should have a maximum length of 6000 words. For details about format see www.maney.co.uk/journals/notes/isr.

Schedule
July 2011: declare intention to contribute (title & abstract)

September 2011: submit first version

January 2012: reviewers' comments & decision returned to authors

March 2012: final version due to the publisher

June 2012: issue published as ISR 37.2

Please address all enquiries to the Editor.

Willard McCarty, Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

BSLS small grants 2010

2010-02-24T14:17:00.002Z

Applications are invited for BSLS small grants of up to £150 to advance and/or promote the study of literature and science. Examples of things for which the awards might be used are conferences, panels on literature and science, expenses for visiting speakers, seminar series and debates.

Applicants should be members of BSLS and should apply by making a case, in up to 300 words, for how the award will contribute to the development of literature and science; a brief costing should be appended to the end of the application.

The application should be e-mailed, as a Word attachment, to the BSLS Treasurer (daniel.cordle@ntu.ac.uk) by 22 March 2010. Applications will be considered by the BSLS Executive Committee and a total of up to £300 will be awarded; no correspondence will be entered into about the decisions of the Committee.

International members of BSLS are welcome to apply for the awards, but should note that they will be distributed in the form of bank cheques made out in pounds sterling. Serving members of the BSLS Executive Committee are not eligible to apply for the awards

Postgraduate Studentships - Translating Cultures: Literature, Music and the Arts in a World Context

2010-02-24T13:28:00.002Z

The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Aberdeen is offering funding for postgraduate students interested in pursuing research on the topic of ‘Translating Cultures: Literature, Music and the Arts in a World Context ’, a four-year interdisciplinary project that sets out to explore how the arts matter in an age of globalization. Through a series of case studies that take up the theme of ‘translating cultures’ from a variety of perspectives and with regard to different geopolitical constellations, this project seeks to illuminate the ways in which the arts play a significant role in contemporary societies. We invite applications from students from a wide range of humanities and social science disciplines, including those interested in pursuing practice-based PhDs in Music, and Film and Visual Culture. Candidates interested in joining the project who do not yet have a masters degree, can apply for funding to take one of our research preparation masters: the MLitt in Comparative Literature or the MLitt in Visual Culture .

This project draws on existing research strengths at the University of Aberdeen, such as Francophone studies, which has been singled out by successive RAE sub-panels as truly distinctive and ground-breaking. ‘Translating Cultures’ forges links between this research focus and strengths in other areas, such as Latin American Studies, Visual Culture, Cultural Sociology and Electroacoustic Music.

The supervisory team is drawn from a number of disciplines, including Anthropology, Film and Visual Culture, French, German, Hispanic Studies, History, History of Art, Music, Museum Studies and Sociology. Possible research titles and topics may include the following:

- Minor Cinema and Art;
- The Politics of Landscape (Film and Photography);
- Investigating Art as Thought in the Literature, Film and Music of the Haitian, Antillean and West African traditions;
- Writing (in) the Museum: Constructing Knowledge Through Text;
- The Role of the Art Institute in Oil Cities;
- The City as a Space of Experiment;
- The Laboratory as a Creative and Critical Site in Contemporary Art;
- Cinema and the Construction of the Critical Spectator;
- Performing Self and Community;
- Spaces for Creation / Spaces for Performance: A Study in Electroacoustic Music;
- Thinking the Archive;
- Developing a New Concept of the Working-Class Aesthetic.

For further information, see http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cass/graduate/funding/research/translating-cultures

Seminar - Late Darwin: extinction, aesthetics, and the human

2010-02-24T13:21:00.001Z

Dame Gillian Beer, Clare Hall

*History and Economics Seminar*
** Wednesday 24 February at 5pm **

The seminar meets in the Bridgetower Room, Trinity Hall, Trinity Lane

Book Launch - It's Just the Beating of My Heart

2010-02-24T09:48:00.001Z

Richard Aronowitz's eagerly awaited second novel is published by Flambard in March. An art dealer with a fading reputation, John Stack finds solace in alcohol-fuelled walks through a Gloucestershire valley. His wife has left him, taking their daughter Bryony with her, and John finds himself increasingly drawn towards a beautiful and enigmatic neighbour. Told in sparkling poetic language, It’s Just the Beating of My Heart is a story of loss, heartbreak and hope by the author of the acclaimed Five Amber Beads.

A launch event for It’s Just the Beating of My Heart will take place at the Fulham Road branch of Daunt Books (158-164 Fulham Road, London SW10 9PR) on Thursday, 4th March 2010 from 6.30 to 8.30pm. There will be drinks and snacks, as well as a reading from the novel.

CFP - Reweaving the Rainbow: Literature and Philosophy 1850-1910

2010-02-24T09:36:00.001Z

University of Exeter, 10th - 11th September 2010
Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof. Michael Wood (Princeton)

Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine --
Unweave a rainbow...
(Keats, Lamia, 229-237)

John Keats' famous indictment illustrates the historically ambivalent encounter between literature and 'cold' philosophy. In the decades that followed, this relationship was to enter a new phase, as each field sought to redefine itself to befit the emerging conditions of modernity. Yet even as the endeavour to explore philosophical issues and the influence of philosophical discourses burgeoned in novels, poetry and essays, the separate institutionalisation of philosophy and English literature in universities from the early 1890s pulled these most intimately related 'disciplines' apart.

This interdisciplinary two-day conference will explore the vicissitudes of influence, appropriation, interaction and disciplinarity in 'English literature' and 'philosophy'. It will address the ways in which literature is philosophical and philosophy is literary, and how their interactions evolved in the course of this period. We are seeking to raise a range of issues including, but not limited to:

* How novels and poetry exploit the philosophical potentialities of literary form, including the treatment and expansion of philosophical issues such as ethics and epistemology in literary works (eg. Henry James' empiricism, Wilde's aphorisms)

* The influence of philosophers on literary writers (eg. Feuerbach and Eliot, Ancient Greek philosophy and Arnold, Nietzsche and Vernon Lee)

* Intellectual and literary culture in Britain (eg. the Classics in Oxford, the British Hegelians, the rise of Positivism, the persistence of Romantic philosophies)

* The philosophy of literature and the arts (eg. Ruskin, George Moore, Arthur Symons)

* The way that science influenced philosophical discourses in essays, novels and poetry (eg. evolution and ethics, Hardy and social Darwinism)

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 2nd April 2010. Please send an abstract of around 300 words and a brief biography to Dr. Kate Hext and EII Research Fellow Alice Barnaby at k.hext@ex.ac.uk no later than this date. Questions and comments are also welcome!

CFP - 'Half Dust, Half Deity; or, Science, Nature, & the Supernatural in the Long Eighteenth Century

2010-02-19T15:45:00.000Z

24th – 25th April, 2010, English Faculty, Cambridge
Call for papers here. Further information at the website here.
Deadline 19th March 2010.

1st March

2010-02-16T09:26:00.001Z

For the last meeting of this term we'll conclude our exploration of alchemy and chemistry with Tony Harrison's 1992 play Square Rounds. This is available in the West Room and Reading Room of the University Library, or in the English Faculty library, or from second-hand book websites. We meet, as usual, in room G03 of the Mary Allan Building at Homerton College, Cambridge, from 7.30-9pm. All welcome!

E.O. Wilson - 'Trailhead'

2010-02-14T15:43:00.000Z

A short story about the life and death of a Queen ant and her colony, online at The New Yorker.

Next term

2010-02-07T12:56:00.001Z

An advance announcement that next term we shall be reading fairy-tales of science: a selection of texts from the long nineteenth century that combined new science and technologies with the myths and stories of old.

A Herschel Trio

2010-02-04T16:12:00.002Z

15th February

2010-02-02T08:29:00.002Z

For our third meeting of term we continue our readings on alchemy and chemistry with selections from Primo Levi and Oliver Sacks (details below). A photocopy of the readings is available in the Whipple Library boxfile. We meet as usual from 7.30-9pm in room G03 of the Mary Allan Building, Homerton College. All welcome!

Primo Levi, L'altrui mestiere (1985). Translated by Raymond Rosenthal as Other People's Trades. Michael Joseph Ltd, London, 1989. This is a collection of short essays, which originally appeared in the Turin newspaper La Stampa. We will look at "The Mark of the Chemist" (pp. 86-90), "The Language of Chemists (I)" (pp. 100-105), "The Language of Chemists (II)" (pp. 106-110), "Ex-Chemist" (pp. 174-176)

Two chapters from Oliver Sacks' memoir, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001). Reprinted by Picador, London, 2002. Chapter 7, "Chemical Recreations" (pp. 67-76) Chapter 8, "Stinks and Bangs" (pp. 77-90)

Cabinet of Natural History talk

2010-01-29T11:32:00.001Z

On Monday 1st February, Kelley Swain will present a talk on "Beale, Bennett, Scoresby (and Melville!): a 'natural' history of cetology".

As always, the Cabinet will meet at 1pm in HPS seminar room 1. All are welcome, and free to bring lunch.

Poetry Live for Haiti

2010-01-28T10:53:00.002Z

A fundraising event for the people of Haiti presented by Carol Ann Duffy and Poetry Live
Carol Ann Duffy Andrew Motion Roger McGough
John Agard Dannie Abse Brian Patten
Gillian Clarke Imtiaz Dharker Grace Nichols
Elaine Feinstein Daljit Nagra Ian Duhig
Lachlan Mackinnon Owen Sheers Glyn Maxwell
Jo Shapcott Robin Robertson Colette Bryce
Maura Dooley Robert Minhinnick
plus musicians John Sampson and Andy Roberts

Saturday 30 January 2010, 2.30pm
Westminster Central Hall
Tickets are £10.

Telephone 01497 822629 or go to www.poetryliveforhaiti.org
Tickets will be available at the door on the day for cash only.
All proceeds will go to the Disasters Emergency Committee's Haiti Earthquake Appeal.

This event has been made possible thanks to the huge generosity of the Guardian Hay Festival, Westminster Central Hall, Eclipse Sound & Light and Goldring Security.

The Coral Thief

2010-01-24T16:21:00.000Z

Former Reading Group member Rebecca Stott's new novel The Coral Thief is out now! For further details see here.

1st February

2010-01-21T14:24:00.000Z

We shall meet, as usual, from 7.30-9pm in room G03 of the Mary Allan Building, Homerton College. We continue our explorations of alchemy and chemistry with Honoré de Balzac's La Recherche de l'absolu (1834). This has been translated into English at least three times: by William Robson as Balthazar; or, Science and Love (1859), by Katharine Prescott Wormeley as The Alkahest: or, The House of Claës (1887), and by Ellen Marriage as The Quest of the Absolute (1895). We will use the Ellen Marriage translation, as this is the cheapest one to buy in paperback reprint. Various texts are also available online from Google Books, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg. Alternatively, I shall put my copy of the book in the Whipple Library box-file from Monday 25th for reading in the library.

All welcome!

Review - Ortolano, 'The Two Cultures Controversy'

2010-01-18T22:49:00.001Z

Guy Ortolano. The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2009. xi + 295 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-89204-9.

Reviewed by Peter Mandler
Published on H-Albion (January, 2010)
Commissioned by Thomas Hajkowski

The Two Cultures

The controversy between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis over the "two cultures" was not just another round in the eternal ding-dong between the claims of science and the claims of literature. What gave it its resonance--some of which it still just about retains in the early twenty-first century--was, as Guy Ortolano shows in this subtle and illuminating book, its rough congruence with key disagreements within English liberalism at a very crucial moment for liberalism in the late 1950s and early 1960s (that is, just "before the deluge" of the later 1960s and afterward which greatly polarized society and politics). Ortolano starts by pointing out some surprising similarities between Leavis and Snow. Both were upwardly mobile from provincial lower middle-class backgrounds, Leavis the son of a Cambridge shopkeeper, Snow the son of a Leicester clerk. Both were fierce critics of the old British Establishment and equally fierce defenders of meritocracy. Both mistrusted equality and sought to generate an intellectual elite in their own image. But they differed radically on their diagnoses of contemporary civilization, and on what kind of elite was needed. Snow was essentially an optimist, a champion of the forces of modernization--scientific, technical, economic--that he saw transforming and improving not only his own society but also those of others around the world. Leavis was a deep-dyed pessimist, a mordant observer of a moral and cultural decline that he thought had set in as far back as the seventeenth century, and had then been radically aggravated by the Industrial Revolution. To him, "modern civilization" was practically a contradiction in terms, and his intellectual elite could probably never be other than a saving remnant, tending the guttering flame of true civilization that still shone in great books and exemplary lives.

Ortolano sketches these two worldviews--perhaps a little too ingeniously, by focusing on Snow's novels and Leavis's attitudes to science--and then shows in the four core chapters of the book how their conflict highlights changing sensibilities at the dawn of the 1960s. In the years while the university world was "waiting for Robbins"--that is, just before the explicit governmental embrace of a rapid expansion of higher education--both Snow and Leavis cultivated nurseries at Cambridge (Snow at the new foundation, Churchill College, Leavis from his personal base at Downing College), not only to breed the new elites they thought necessary either to advance or to stymie modernization but also to help them to enunciate the very meaning of a university. Both the Churchill and the Downing English experiments were drowned or at least diluted by the Robbins deluge that followed. Intellectually, both Snow and Leavis adumbrated a particular interpretation of English social history: Snow's a "scientific" variety, exemplified by Peter Laslett and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, though he valued this work instrumentally to the extent that it supported his own triumphalist account of social progress; Leavis's a romantic-critical variety, which to his disappointment would in the 1960s be taken up principally by Marxists who otherwise proved unpleasant bedfellows. Most importantly, both Snow and Leavis addressed directly one of the most heated arguments of the late 1950s and early 1960s, over the nature and sources of English economic "decline." Unsurprisingly, Snow was one of the principal promoters in Britain of the modernization program of Kennedy liberals like W. W. Rostow, whose influential "non-Communist manifesto," _The Stages of Economic Growth_ (1960), took Britain's Industrial Revolution as a model and proposed to broadcast it throughout the world. Snow had no difficulty fitting this up for domestic consumption, attempting to reignite the engines of British industrialization with doses of state action--investment in new technologies and, again, new scientific elites--in the brief heyday of Harold Wilson's "white heat," though also following Rostow in recommending industrialization to the developing world, in his view a "modern" alternative to the agrarianism and paternalism of the old imperial ethos. Leavis, of course, was not much bothered by economic decline--he thought "modernization" the problem rather than the solution--and intriguingly contributed something of the New Left's cultural relativism (and perhaps even some of its environmentalism) by scorning the idea that the lives of Congolese or Indonesians would be in any way ameliorated by "increasing supplies of jam" (p. 211).

The payoff comes in the final chapter when Ortolano shows how in their different ways both Leavis and Snow were devastated by the rise of egalitarianism and relativism in the 1960s. Their educational experiments were both out of step with the Robbins generation, though both left their marks. Snow's political career capsized when he failed to be able to explain why he had to send his own son to Eton. Both of these rugged individualists were soured by what they took to be the indiscipline and frivolity of youth. Their trajectories
towards the end of their lives are highly revealing. Though Ortolano does not make much of this, the rapid polarization of the socialist and the liberal elements in the Labour coalition during the 1970s highlights how tenuous had been their coexistence pact. Had he lived long enough, Snow would surely have left with the SDP split and probably ended up amongst the American neoconservatives to whom, as Ortolano neatly reveals, he had long been close. Snow, at least, had a liberal mainstream to return to; Leavis was left high and dry. The odd parallelisms that organize Ortolano's book break down here because Leavis's thought was simply too idiosyncratic to flow neatly into one of the main currents of social and political thought. As
Ortolano can and does argue, many of Leavis's romantic-critical motifs fed into the New Left--his influence on Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, and especially Raymond Williams is given due attention here--but not in ways that Leavis would have recognized as Leavisite. It would perhaps have been better to uncomplicate the argument and admit that Leavis was most himself not when social or political but when literary. That is to say, the "two cultures controversy" was not only about "science and literature," but also about science and about literature, and Ortolano's argument would have been less neat but more complete had he allotted more space to Leavis's specifically literary self-positioning.

Yet even this cul-de-sac indicates one of the signal virtues of this book, which is that it captures a pregnant moment in the history of ideas--around 1960--in all its momentariness. In some respects that moment accelerates trends, in others it mashes and recombines them, in still others it confronts them with unhappy endings. History is messy like that. Ortolano's book conveys that moment of agonized contingency beautifully, making sense enough out of it that the non-specialist can connect his particular material to some of the big
stories of postwar British history--democratization, modernization, decolonization, and "decline"--while generally resisting the temptation to make more sense than the material will bear. This is an exceptionally thoughtful, and thought-provoking, work from which (truly) every modern British historian will learn something fresh and useful.

Citation: Peter Mandler. Review of Ortolano, Guy, _The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain_. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. January, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25388

This work is licensed under a Creative Commonsq Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This term's Evolution Reading Group

2010-01-14T12:10:00.002Z

Science and Literature Reading Group members might be interested in attending some of the HPS department's Evolution Reading Group meetings this term - especially the following seminars on a novel Charles Darwin read whilst an Edinburgh student, and on poetry from Ruth Padel and our very own Kelley Swain:

21st January
Horace Smith, Brambletye House:or, Cavaliers and Roundheads, 3 vols, 3rd ed. (London: Colburn, 1826), chapters XI-XIII, pp. 97-128. Available on Google Books.

4th February
Kelley Swain, Darwin's Microscope (Flambard Press, 2009), poems 'Fossil Memories', 'Towards Perfection', 'Tectonic Motion', 'Spherical Motion'; Ruth Padel, Darwin: A Life in Poems (Chatto & Windus, 2009), chapter 2, 'Journey'.

A Herschel Trio - Astronomy, Biography and Music

2010-01-13T18:58:00.000Z

Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge

Featuring a talk from Michael Hoskin, a reading from Kelley Swain, and performances of William Herschel's oboe concerto in Eb and a trio sonata.

Wednesday February 3rd 2010, 6-9pm

Tickets are free but must be reserved via HPS reception on 01223 330906.

Oxford Literature and Science Seminar - Hilary Term 2010

2010-01-12T16:51:00.000Z

Friday, 12 February at 2 pm
Dr. Carina Bartleet (Dept of English, Oxford Brookes University)
"Faustian Anatomies: Punchdrunk's Natural Philosophy of Dis-Memberment"

Friday, 26 February at 2 pm
Professor Peter Middleton (Dept of English, University of Southampton)
"The Poetics of Inquiry: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War"

All seminars will take place in St Catherine's College, the Arumugam Building (go to the top floor above the Lodge)

Event 2 - Theories and Methods: Literature, Science and Medicine

2010-01-12T16:49:00.000Z

After a hugely successful first event (see the student blogs in the social space for reports and diaries from this event), application forms are now online for the second event in our AHRC doctoral training programme ‘Theories and Methods: Literature, Science and Medicine’.

This event will take place from 25-27th March at the Wellcome Library, King’s College, London, and the Royal College of Surgeons. More details and the programme are available on our website. There will be 20 places awarded, with bursaries for accommodation and travel.

If you have not done so, please do register for the LitSciMed social space by emailing Cristina da Costa (C.MendesdaCosta@salford.ac.uk). Here you will see discussion topics accompanying the training programme, plus blog postings, films of lectures, audio recordings and other learning resources for students working on topics that combine literature, science and medicine.

Applications for event 2 must be submitted by Monday 1st February.

18th January

2010-01-12T09:49:00.000Z

Join us from 7.30-9pm in a slightly different venue - room G03 in the Mary Allan Building, Homerton College - for the first Science and Literature Reading Group meeting of term.

We begin our exploration of alchemy and chemistry with: selections from Elias Ashmole (ed.), Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (London: 1652). Reprinted as No. 39 of The Sources of Science by Johnson Reprint Corporation, New York & London, 1967. This is available online at http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/printedbooksNew/index.cfm?textID=ashmole (Note that pp. 281-288 are misnumbered in the printed text.) We will look at "Pearce the Black Monke upon the Elixir" (pp. 269-274) "The Breviary of Naturall Philosophy. Compiled by the unlettered Scholar Thomas Charnock" (pp. 291-303 in the printed text; 287-303 online) "The Vision of Sr George Ripley" (pp. 374)

All welcome!

CFP – Language as a Scientific Tool

2010-01-07T21:18:00.001Z

Language as a Scientific Tool. Managing Language as a Variable of Practice and Presentation

Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, 29th-30th November 2010

Organizers:

Institute for Culture Studies and History of Theatre, Austrian Academy of Sciences

Working Group History of Science, History Department, University of Vienna

Department of Political Science and Sociology, European University at St. Petersburg

English and German Departments, University of Granada

Language has played an important and extended role in the history and philosophy of sciences, with language itself also becoming the subject of scholarship. Linguistic environments of scientists have unavoidably affected scientific research at various levels by, for instance, imposing cultural constraints and preconceptions, and by affecting the bounds of communication that structure science as social engagement. Despite the relevance of this phenomenon, insufficient historiographical and philosophical consideration has been paid to scientists' own thoughts on language as the essential medium of their practice, and as a malleable element that can be shaped to suit their goals.

The aim of this conference is, thus, to consider the history of language as an object of scientific concern, whether for epistemological or semantic reasons, stemming from scientists' understanding of language as a tool for conceptualising the world, from concerns on successfully communicating within the scientific community among specialists or merely between scientists and the general public. In either case the examination of the historical circumstances that have motivated such reflection appear paramount.

Language can also be considered as a consciously modelled tool for achieving definite scientific and political goals. Indeed, Bacon began his natural philosophy explicitly criticising scholastic ideas on language, which for him obscured nature instead of clarifying it. Therefore, it seemed to him that language had to be reformed and properly redefined to serve in the natural philosophic endeavour. Locke gave specific attention to language as a prior question to setting an epistemological basis to natural philosophy, in turn enforcing a separation between word and meaning that put natural philosophers in direct control over their language. This revolution in language was also one of the key points of the new science hailed by members of Royal Society such as John Wilkins, who was appointed a treatise on a new philosophical and universal language. Other voices argued that gaining explicit control over language was the only way to free it from past misconceptions. The claim that science needed to formulate a theory of language able to underwrite scientists' epistemic activity recurs right up until logical positivism.

At the same time, the Renaissance witnessed the struggle between Latin and the vernacular languages as means for the written codification of knowledge. From a dominant and hegemonic position, Latin gradually ceased being the only appropriate means for learned discourse, the vernaculars taking its place. Then, language critics displayed diverse arguments intertwining language with politics. In Germany, for instance, the main argument in linguistic change at the universities was the need of the introduction of a new science requiring a language distinct from scholastic Latin (Christian Wolff, Christian Thomasius), and thus not pervaded with scholastic ideas.

This conference focuses on the question of how the process of linguistic change was effected, perceived, and conducted by scientists. From the field of philosophical discussions, to the field of language in use, it is possible to pose crucial questions such as the following:

How has science sought to manage language through philosophical conceptions or rhetorical techniques to obtain particular goals, epistemic or otherwise? To what extent have scientists engaged in linguistic argumentation to criticize competing paradigms?
Has language been considered to be perfectly manageable? How have influences from e.g. other languages been coped with? Can it be said that linguistic purism relates only to alien words, or also to changing reality such as technology or geographical discoveries?
How has the communication of science been discussed in relation to both the existing world and the learned community? Has science been seen as corresponding more accurately with the reality (following Herder) if written in the national language of a community? How has the communication of discoveries with other scientists been perceived if this was the case? Which were the points of conflict between perfect translatability and innate and unique features of natural languages in thisrespect?
In what contexts have issues of language been raised and to what ends? Is it a purely philosophically-driven debate for the purpose of articulating science, or are political and social factors (co)responsible for the crises of languages commonly used in the past?
Who were the actors of linguistic change? Did scientists/natural philosophers play only a minor role, or did the impulses and crises of used languages come from other sources?
Did scientists try to develop their own definitions of language as competing with philosophical ones? How did the endeavors for perfection of language differ among different groups?

Postgraduates are particularly encouraged to submit proposals for twenty-minute papers.

The language of the conference is English. The organizers plan to publish a selection of papers from this conference.

Please e-mail 300-word abstracts or proposals with a brief CV to Rocío Sumillera: sumille@correo.ugr.es by Monday, March 1st 2010.

Further contacts:

Johannes Feichtinger (Institute for Culture Studies and History of Theatre, Austrian Academy of Sciences): johannes.feichtinger@oeaw.ac.at

Miles MacLeod (Konrad Lorenz Institut, Vienna): miles.macleod@kli.ac.at

Ekaterina Smirnova (Department of Political Science and Sociology, European University at St. Petersburg): esmirnova@eu.spb.ru

Jan Surman (History Department, University of Vienna / Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota): jan.surman@univie.ac.at

Lent Term 2010

2010-01-05T16:12:00.000Z

This term we will focus on alchemy and chemistry, reading an array of texts from different genres and time periods. We meet fortnightly on Monday evenings, from 7.30-9pm, in a new venue: room MAB G03 at Homerton College. Readings are detailed below, and photocopied packs will be made available from the Group boxfile in the Whipple Library from the beginning of term. Organised by Daniel Friesner (Science Museum) and Melanie Keene (Homerton College). For updates, further information and relevant news listings please see this blog; email Melanie to join our dedicated mailing list. All welcome!

18th January

Selections from Elias Ashmole (ed.), Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (London: 1652).

Reprinted as No. 39 of The Sources of Science by Johnson Reprint Corporation, New York & London, 1967. Available online at http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/printedbooksNew/index.cfm?textID=ashmole (Note that pp. 281-288 are misnumbered in the printed text.) We will look at "Pearce the Black Monke upon the Elixir" (pp. 269-274) "The Breviary of Naturall Philosophy. Compiled by the unlettered Scholar Thomas Charnock" (pp. 291-303 in the printed text; 287-303 online) "The Vision of Sr George Ripley" (pp. 374)

1st February

Honoré de Balzac, La Recherche de l'absolu (1834).

This has been translated into English at least three times: by William Robson as Balthazar; or, Science and Love (1859), by Katharine Prescott Wormeley as The Alkahest: or, The House of Claës (1887), by Ellen Marriage as The Quest of the Absolute (1895). We will use the Ellen Marriage translation, as this is the cheapest one to buy in paperback reprint. Various texts are also available online from google books, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg.

15th February

Primo Levi, L'altrui mestiere (1985). Translated by Raymond Rosenthal as Other People's Trades. Michael Joseph Ltd, London, 1989. This is a collection of short essays, which originally appeared in

the Turin newspaper La Stampa. We will look at "The Mark of the Chemist" (pp. 86-90), "The Language of Chemists (I)" (pp. 100-105), "The Language of Chemists (II)" (pp. 106-110), "Ex-Chemist" (pp. 174-176)

in conjunction with two chapters from Oliver Sacks' memoir, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001). Reprinted by Picador, London, 2002. Chapter 7, "Chemical Recreations" (pp. 67-76) Chapter 8, "Stinks and Bangs" (pp. 77-90)

1st March

Tony Harrison, Square Rounds. Faber and Faber, London, 1992.

Anthology - Climate Change Poetry

2010-01-04T14:40:00.000Z

Feeling the Pressure - Poetry and science of climate change
This anthology of poems and scientific texts concerned with climate change was edited by Paul Munden and published by the British Council Switzerland in February 2008. It is available to download as a pdf here.

Bibliography of Physics and Literature

2010-01-04T10:54:00.000Z

Katy Price, erstwhile organiser of the Science and Literature Reading Group, has compiled an extremely helpful bibliography of works relating to (mainly) twentieth-century physics and literature. It's available on her blog here.

Opera - Three Tales

2010-01-04T09:58:00.002Z

Music by Steve Reich; Film by Beryl Korot

11pm, Wed 17th - Sat 20th Feb 2010, The ADC Theatre, Cambridge

Rubbish Productions with Ensemble BPM

“The human body is extremely limited. I would love to upgrade myself.” (Kevin Warwick)

Three Tales is a documentary digital video opera that recalls three events of significant social and scientific importance from the early, middle and late 20th century: the crash of the Hindenburg Zeppelin, the nuclear bomb testings at Bikini atoll, and the cloning of Dolly the Sheep. Through a rich tapestry of live opera and moving image, each of these reflects on the growth and implications of technology during the 20th century from early air transport to the current ethical debate on artificial intelligence and the future of our species.

Set to music by one of the greatest living composers, the Three Tales are told from various perspectives, with speech culled from interviews with eyewitnesses, audiovisual documentary material of both the Hindenburg and Bikini tragedies, and experts in computer science (Marvin Minsky), artificial intelligence (Rodney Brooks), Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, and genetic engineering (Richard Dawkins).