HPS seminars

A number of next term's seminars in the HPS department may be of interest to Reading Group members:

1.) Departmental Seminar, Thursday 21st May, 4.30pm
Guy Ortolano (University of Virginia)
The two cultures controversy: science, literature and cultural politics in postwar Britain

This talk will be about my recent book The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2009). Ever since the scientist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow clashed with literary critic F.R. Leavis in the early 1960s, it has been a commonplace to lament that intellectual life is divided between 'two cultures', the arts and sciences. Yet why did a topic that had long been discussed inspire such ferocious controversy at this particular moment? This talk answers that question by recasting this dispute as an ideological conflict between competing visions of Britain's past, present and future. By excavating the political stakes of the 'two cultures' controversy, this talk seeks to explain the workings of cultural politics during the 1960s more generally, while also revising the meaning of a term that continues to be evoked to this day.


2.) Evolution Reading Group, Thursdays, 1-2pm

21st May, Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: evolutionary narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and nineteenth-century fiction (1983), chapters 2 & 3.

4 June, Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (1863), chapters 1–4.