Science and Literature Festival - UCL, 6th September

On 6 September 2014, University College London hosts a new Science and Literature Festival organised by The Memory Network:  ‘Memory in the twenty-first century’, featuring, in conversation:

• Ian McEwan & Paul Bloom (Yale, USA)
• Suzanne Corkin (MIT, USA) & Hugo Spiers (UCL)
• Maud Casey, Timothy J. Jarvis & Sebastian Groes (Roehampton)
• Anna Stothard & Jason Tougaw (CUNY, USA)
• Naomi Alderman & Jessica Bland (Nesta)

The Memory Network is a research networking organisation funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Wellcome Trust, bringing scientists, scholars and writers together to think about memory in new, twenty-first century contexts.
In association with The Guardian, The Memory Network is organising a festival at which writers discuss the relationship between storytelling and memory in dialogue with a neuroscientist, technology futures specialist, and a neuro-literary critic. How does the digital environment change our memory and storytelling? Can you tell a story via objects? In what ways is psychiatry dependent on fictional narratives? How can we turn the life of an amnesiac man into a story worth remembering? These and many other questions will be debated, whilst neuropsychologist Paul Bloom will interrogate one of the finest, and most provocative, contemporary writers who throughout his career has sought to realign the fraught relationship between literature and science: Ian McEwan.
The literary festival is held in the Gustave Tuck lecture theatre at UCL, starts at 12.30. The programme finishes at 6pm. Entry is free but seats must be reserved by sending an email to memorynetwork@roehampton.ac.uk.