Representing the Medical Body: 28 March 2019, Science Museum, London

A one-day workshop at the Science Museum, London, organised by Katy Barrett (Curator of Art Collections) and Sarah Wade (Research Manager)

In 2019, a series of five landmark new medicine galleries will open at the Science Museum in London. A series of contemporary art commissions form a significant part of this project along with images of the human body throughout the history of art. This provides an ideal opportunity to reflect on the unique ways in which the body has been represented in relation to health and medicine through the history of art and visual culture.

This one-day interdisciplinary workshop will bring together artists, scientists and historians of art, science and medicine to explore artistic responses to medicine and representations of the medical body throughout history. Papers are invited from a range of critical frameworks including, feminist, queer, postcolonialist, posthuman and gender studies. Contributions can take a variety of forms including papers, artist's talks, films and performances. The day will end with a response from Professor Ludmilla Jordanova, Department of History, Durham University.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers. Topics might include:

• Medical models and anatomy
• Death and dying
• Medical portraiture
• Representations of disability, disease and healing
• Photography and ethnography or anthropology
• Contemporary or historical medical imaging
• The role of imagery in diagnosis

Please send a 250-word abstract and a short bio of no more than a paragraph to sarah.wade@sciencemuseum.ac.uk by the end of Sunday 20^th January 2019.

JOB - BOOKSELLER AND CATALOGUER – SCIENCE SPECIALIST

Location: Chelsea, London Salary: £25-35,000 p.a. dependent on experience plus benefits
Duration: Permanent
Hours: Full time 5 days per week to include alternate Saturdays

Peter Harrington Limited, an established antiquarian bookseller with a global presence, are seeking to appoint a cataloguer with strong scientific knowledge and interest.

JOB SPECIFICATION

Main duties and responsibilities include:
• research and cataloguing of material related to science, from antiquity to modernity
• sourcing, buying and selling stock of scientific interest
• cataloguing, buying and selling stock items of a more general natur
• representing the business at trade fairs in the UK and overseas
• maintaining current specialist knowledge of the global book trade including sources of supply, e.g. auctions, booksellers, third party websites and private individuals
• working flexibly as required to accommodate staff shortages during trade fairs and seasonal/exceptional extended opening hours

PERSON SPECIFICATION

Skills, qualifications and experience include:
 • strong interest in, and knowledge of, the history of science (essential)
• good knowledge of rare/antiquarian books and the rare book trade (desirable)
• demonstrable knowledge and experience in purchasing and selling rare books (desirable)
• a high degree of IT literacy including databases, Microsoft Office and the internet (essential)
• strong research skills (essential)
• excellent spoken and written English and excellent numeracy (essential)
• excellent interpersonal and communication skills (essential)
• the ability and confidence to deal with a wide range of people (essential)
• be free, willing, and able to travel abroad on a regular basis, both as part of a team or alone, as the company’s representative (essential)
• good team working (essential)
• the ability to work under pressure (essential)
• commercial awareness (desirable)

Applicants should request an application form from Sam Caethoven at sam@peterharrington.co.uk or 020 7591 0220

Narrative Science public seminar series

For the abstracts, and details as to the time and location, please check the website: 

15th January 2019:
Sharon Crasnow (Norco College)- 'Counterfactual Narrative in Political Science'
Phyllis Kirstin Illari (UCL)- TBA

29th January 2019:
Ivan Flis (University of Utrecht)- 'Narrating an unfinished science: Scientific psychology in late-twentieth century textbooks'
Adrian Currie (University of Exeter)- 'History is Peculiar​'

12th February 2019:
Alfred Nordmann (Technical University Darmstadt)- 'A Feeling for the Mechanism'
Eleonora Loiodice (Università degli Studi di Bari)- 'Science as a creation: Giorgio de Santillana’s approach to history of science'

26th February 2019:
Annamaria Contini (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)- 'Metaphor as narrative reconfiguration: an example in the French physiology of the late nineteenth century'
Adelene Buckland (King's College London)- 'Plot Problems: Geological Narratives, Anti-Narratives, and Counter-Narratives in the Early Nineteenth Century'

 12th March 2019:
Sarah Dillon (University of Cambridge)- 'Reasoning by Analogy: ELIZA, Pygmalion and the Societal Harm of Gendering Virtual Personal Assistants'
Vito De Lucia (The Arctic University of Norway)- 'Reading law outside of the legal text: legal narratives'

26th March 2019:
Marco Tamborini (Technical University Darmstadt)- 'Narrating the Deep Past'
Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter)- 'From Travel Diary to Species Catalogue: How Linnaeus Came to See Lapland'

 

Exhibition in the Library of Christ's College: "The Secrets of Life: Scientists, Mathematicians, and the Hunt for Answers".

The exhibition is curated by Senior Library Assistant Katherine Krick-Pridgeon, and examines work in life sciences, biochemistry, physics, and mathematics from the fifteenth century to the present. Among many other items, the exhibition includes books by Copernicus, Galileo and Margaret Cavendish, the earliest plant specimens collected by Charles Darwin, and recent molecular models and laboratory noteboooks. The exhibition is open to the public until 25 April 2019 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm, during Michaelmas and Lent terms. For further details see here.

Call for submissions - A History of Science Sourcebook

REMINDER: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS (deadline January 10th 2019)

We are asking for: Sources and explanatory text for a history of science sourcebook that focuses on women in science (broadly construed) from a global perspective, from antiquity to the present day.

Aims: Our sourcebook is designed to complement the teaching of undergraduate history of science courses, by providing sources that reveal women’s involvement in knowledge production from around the world. Our ambition is to contribute to liberating the curriculum within the history of science, by giving voice to underrepresented actors, and by providing sources that go beyond traditional textual accounts, alongside brief explanatory notes.

Details: Possible sources might include letters, instruments, weapons, artwork, poetry, textiles, recipes, diary entries, and scrapbooks amongst many others. We particularly welcome new translations and transcriptions. We welcome submissions under, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Materials of Science
• Objects and alternative sources 
• Media, Art, Images, Sculpture 
• Exploration 
• Maritime, space exploration 
• Empire and exoticism 
• Map making, travel accounts 
• Non-western knowledge making 
• Non-traditional disciplines and methods 
• Non-western ideologies and cosmologies 
• Alternative measuring devices or instruments 
• Medicine Disease and healing 
• The body, embodied experience 
• Food, recipes, and care 
• Religion 
• Knowledge and belief 
• Ritual and medicine 
• Conflicts and cooperation 
• Science & Violence 
• War 
• Colonialism and oppressive practices
• Crime 
• Spaces and Communities 
• Domestic and professional spaces, institutions 
• Networks, access and agency 
• Rebels, dissenters, outsiders 
• Popular science and consuming knowledge 
• Indigenous & Folk knowledge 
• Marginalised practices and erasure 
• Access & agency 
• Technology 
• Instruments 
• Skill and Artisanry 
• Embodied and/or tacit knowledges 
• Plants and Animals Botany and uses of flora 
• Agriculture 
• Natural history and collecting

How to submit: Please send us the source you would like to use (low res. image or text sources not exceeding 5,000 words), details of the copyright owners of the source, and a covering letter of no more than 200 words. Covering letters should give some background to the source and why you believe it is relevant to this work, as well as a little detail of your own background. A CV may be attached if you wish. Email submissions to historyofsciencesourcebook@yahoo.com by 10th January 2019. Final contributions to the book will be due in May 2019 and consist of no more than 1000 words of explanatory text aimed at introducing each corresponding source to undergraduate students.

An example of a final submission can be found on our website

Please note that all sources must be able to be published in Open Access (Creative Commons) format and that each author will need to acquire copyright permissions to publish their source.

e strongly encourage proposals from early career researchers and people from underrepresented communities. We are also more than happy to consider multiple sources from one applicant.