The Nineteenth Century Graduate Seminar will meet for its third and final session of the Easter term at 5pm on Thursday 30 May, in the Faculty of English Board Room. Our speaker will be Devin Griffiths (University of Southern California), who will speak on the topic of 'The Ecology of Form'; abstract below.
All are most welcome to attend both the discussion and the informal drinks at the Granta afterwards.
'The Ecology of Form'
I'll be talking about Charles Darwin and what we might call the anthropology of plants. Starting with his work on orchids in the 1850s, Darwin was fascinated by plants that suggest a deep continuity between animal and plant life, and he developed a sophisticated array of techniques that allowed him to establish dialogues with their behavior. As a case study, I'll be taking Darwin's late work, The Power of Movement in Plants (1880) in which he developed tools of synchronization, or "entrainment," that allowed plants to write themselves into his work. I'll be using this example to explore how such tools produce a form of collective authorship in which the objects of natural study contribute to their own investigation, a way of voicing nature in scientific publication. My aim is to sketch out a late feature of Darwin's ecological research program, part of a wider effort to study Darwin's importance as an ecologist, and as a process philosopher. But I'm also interested in how that labor becomes visible through, and indeed, is organized by, specific textual forms, here, not simply scientific publication, but experiments in what we might term plant graphology and the printing of plant life, and I'll conclude by discussing the afterlife of these experiments in scientific publication.
Devin Griffiths is Associate Lecturer at the University of Southern California, and author of The Age of Analogy (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)
Showing posts with label Darwin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Darwin. Show all posts
Sunday, May 26, 2019
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies Annual Public Lecture for 2017-18
'The Public Sphere After Darwin: Popular Science Periodicals and the New Space for Debate'
Professor Bernard Lightman (York University, Canada)
LCVS Visiting Professor, 2017-2018
Thursday 22 February in AG32/33 (Conference Suite)
Leeds Trinity University at 6pm (preceded by a wine reception from 5.30pm)
Macmillan's Magazine was one of several new journals that, beginning in the 1860s, altered the dynamics of the public space in Britain for debating the issue of the relationship between science and religion. These journals were founded just as the evolution issue sparked discussions about this relationship. In effect, journals such as Macmillan's Magazine sought to expand the bounds of permissibility through the creation of new formats that encouraged the toleration of unorthodox views. They provided an outlet for scientific naturalists, such as T. H. Huxley, who sought to establish themselves as respectable, cultural authorities while challenging the conventions of polite debate. The period after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species was also characterized by the founding of new popular science journals, such as Recreative Science (founded 1859), Quarterly Journal of Science (1864), Science Gossip (1865), Scientific Opinion (1868), and Nature (1869). The central question of this lecture is: how did popular science journals treat the topic of the relationship between science and religion from the 1860s to the 1880s in light of the creation of new spaces for debate in the general periodical press?
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Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University, and will become President of the History of Science Society starting in January 2018. Lightman's research interests include nineteenth century popular science and Victorian scientific naturalism. Among his most recent publications are the edited and co-edited collections Global Spencerism, A Companion to the History of Science, and Science Museums in Transition. He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall.
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The joint LCVS and University of Leeds Victorian Research Seminar programme – of which the public lecture is the highlight - showcases the research work of Victorianists across the two institutions and beyond. All are warmly welcomed to this event. Please email us to confirm attendance at the public lecture, so we can ensure adequate catering for the occasion.
Professor Bernard Lightman (York University, Canada)
LCVS Visiting Professor, 2017-2018
Thursday 22 February in AG32/33 (Conference Suite)
Leeds Trinity University at 6pm (preceded by a wine reception from 5.30pm)
Macmillan's Magazine was one of several new journals that, beginning in the 1860s, altered the dynamics of the public space in Britain for debating the issue of the relationship between science and religion. These journals were founded just as the evolution issue sparked discussions about this relationship. In effect, journals such as Macmillan's Magazine sought to expand the bounds of permissibility through the creation of new formats that encouraged the toleration of unorthodox views. They provided an outlet for scientific naturalists, such as T. H. Huxley, who sought to establish themselves as respectable, cultural authorities while challenging the conventions of polite debate. The period after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species was also characterized by the founding of new popular science journals, such as Recreative Science (founded 1859), Quarterly Journal of Science (1864), Science Gossip (1865), Scientific Opinion (1868), and Nature (1869). The central question of this lecture is: how did popular science journals treat the topic of the relationship between science and religion from the 1860s to the 1880s in light of the creation of new spaces for debate in the general periodical press?
------
Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University, and will become President of the History of Science Society starting in January 2018. Lightman's research interests include nineteenth century popular science and Victorian scientific naturalism. Among his most recent publications are the edited and co-edited collections Global Spencerism, A Companion to the History of Science, and Science Museums in Transition. He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall.
-----
The joint LCVS and University of Leeds Victorian Research Seminar programme – of which the public lecture is the highlight - showcases the research work of Victorianists across the two institutions and beyond. All are warmly welcomed to this event. Please email us to confirm attendance at the public lecture, so we can ensure adequate catering for the occasion.
Friday, January 27, 2017
Talk - Curious things sent to Charles Darwin in the post
Francis Neary (Darwin Correspondence Project)
Wednesday 1 February, 13:15-13:45, Milstein Room, Cambridge University Library
All are welcome - no need to book. This is part of our ongoing programme of free tours and pop-up talks. Tours are limited to 15 people and can be booked at curiousobjects.eventbrite.co.uk.
Wednesday 1 February, 13:15-13:45, Milstein Room, Cambridge University Library
All are welcome - no need to book. This is part of our ongoing programme of free tours and pop-up talks. Tours are limited to 15 people and can be booked at curiousobjects.eventbrite.co.uk.
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Talk - 'Darwin and Mechnikov in Tolstoy's Literary Imagination'
Thursday 23 April 2015 at 5:00pm in the Beves Room, King's College
Coffee and refreshments available from 4:45pm
Talk Abstract
Leo Tolstoy was a notorious critic of science as it was practiced in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, he was heavily influenced by newly appearing scientific theories. This talk explores Tolstoy's response to two of the most noted scientists of his day: the zoologist, Charles Darwin, and the pathologist, Ilya Mechnikov. Tolstoy frequently criticized both men in his diaries, letters, and essays, but their ideas helped shape his fictional works. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy used his two main characters to represent an acceptance and a rejection of Darwinian theory and, in so doing, highlighted the dangers of regarding it as scientific law. In his final novel, Resurrection, rather than making the characters' fates provide a judgment on scientific theory as he did in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy coopted Mechnikov's phagocytic theory for his own ends, making it the metaphoric basis for his moral philosophy. This offered him a way of synthesizing science and religion through art.
About the speaker
Anna A. Berman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her primary area of research is the family in the nineteenth-century novel, with a focus on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. She is interested in literary depictions of siblinghood, kinship, and forms of love that provide an alternative to the standard romantic love/marriage plot. Her book, Siblings in Tolstoy: The Path to Universal Brotherhood, will be published this fall by Northwestern University Press. Recently, she has begun to research the links between nineteenth-century conceptions of the family and the scientific theories of Charles Darwin and Ilya Mechnikov. Berman also studies Russian opera, with a particular interest in adaptations of literary texts.
Friday, March 20, 2015
CFP - The Darwins Reconsidered
Evolution, Writing & Inheritance in the Works of
Erasmus and Charles Darwin
A One-Day Colloquium: Friday, September 4, 2015
University of Roehampton, London.
Keynote Speakers: Professor David Amigoni (Keele University) Professor Tim Fulford (De Montfort University)
Plenary Speaker: Dr John Holmes (Reading University)
When the 28-year-old Charles Darwin first opened his ‘evolutionary’ notebook in 1837, he deployed the title of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s medical treatise, Zoonomia (1794-6). By then, Erasmus -- poet, doctor, inventor and leading light of the Birmingham Lunar Society -- had drifted into comparative obscurity; best remembered as the eccentric genius whose work The Loves of Plants (1789) had been notoriously parodied as The Loves of Triangles. Erasmus was never forgotten by his more famous grandson, however, and throughout Charles’s career, Erasmus’s writing and thinking acted as both catalyst and antagonist to Charles’s burgeoning evolutionary ideas, on such subjects as heredity, variation and sexual selection. Forty-two years later, Erasmus was also the subject of Charles’s own venture into non-scientific writing – a biography of his illustrious grandfather. In the first academic conference to formally consider the imaginative and scientific relationship between these two remarkable speculative thinkers, we ask, in what ways did Erasmus’s life and works facilitate and anticipate Charles’s ideas, and how did Charles mobilise the stated and unstated affinities with Erasmus to enrich his own thinking?
We invite papers of 20 minutes that consider the two writers in the following broad subject areas:
A One-Day Colloquium: Friday, September 4, 2015
University of Roehampton, London.
Keynote Speakers: Professor David Amigoni (Keele University) Professor Tim Fulford (De Montfort University)
Plenary Speaker: Dr John Holmes (Reading University)
When the 28-year-old Charles Darwin first opened his ‘evolutionary’ notebook in 1837, he deployed the title of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s medical treatise, Zoonomia (1794-6). By then, Erasmus -- poet, doctor, inventor and leading light of the Birmingham Lunar Society -- had drifted into comparative obscurity; best remembered as the eccentric genius whose work The Loves of Plants (1789) had been notoriously parodied as The Loves of Triangles. Erasmus was never forgotten by his more famous grandson, however, and throughout Charles’s career, Erasmus’s writing and thinking acted as both catalyst and antagonist to Charles’s burgeoning evolutionary ideas, on such subjects as heredity, variation and sexual selection. Forty-two years later, Erasmus was also the subject of Charles’s own venture into non-scientific writing – a biography of his illustrious grandfather. In the first academic conference to formally consider the imaginative and scientific relationship between these two remarkable speculative thinkers, we ask, in what ways did Erasmus’s life and works facilitate and anticipate Charles’s ideas, and how did Charles mobilise the stated and unstated affinities with Erasmus to enrich his own thinking?
We invite papers of 20 minutes that consider the two writers in the following broad subject areas:
- poetry, aesthetics, and writing style
- scientific families & heredity
- evolution
- styles of observation
- humour and excess
- pleasure
- biography
- the relation between the arts and sciences
- the natural world
- variation and diversification
- geology
- family life
- experimentation
- scientific method
- public and private sphere
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Conference registration now open - Biological Discourses
The Language of Science and Literature around 1900
The decades around 1900 are a crucial period for the impact of biological thought on the intellectual cultures of the western world. The impulses of Darwinism were taken up by intellectuals, writers and artists from the 1860s onwards, and both Darwinian and anti-Darwinian currents of thinking exercised a powerful influence on the intellectual climate of the early decades of the twentieth century. It was a period that saw major developments in cell biology and the establishment of genetics as we know it, the movement of medical science and psychiatry beyond mechanistic conceptions of illness, and the emergence of psychoanalysis and sexology as new disciplines. “Biological Discourses”, a student-led conference to be held in Cambridge on 10-11 April 2015, is part of a collaborative venture between the Cambridge Department of German & Dutch and the Institute for Modern Languages Research, London, investigating the interplay and the forms of mediation between literary and biological discourses in that period.
Please see the link (http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/german/postgraduates/conferences) for registration, programme and further details, or click below:
Biological_ Discourses Prg (Final)
The decades around 1900 are a crucial period for the impact of biological thought on the intellectual cultures of the western world. The impulses of Darwinism were taken up by intellectuals, writers and artists from the 1860s onwards, and both Darwinian and anti-Darwinian currents of thinking exercised a powerful influence on the intellectual climate of the early decades of the twentieth century. It was a period that saw major developments in cell biology and the establishment of genetics as we know it, the movement of medical science and psychiatry beyond mechanistic conceptions of illness, and the emergence of psychoanalysis and sexology as new disciplines. “Biological Discourses”, a student-led conference to be held in Cambridge on 10-11 April 2015, is part of a collaborative venture between the Cambridge Department of German & Dutch and the Institute for Modern Languages Research, London, investigating the interplay and the forms of mediation between literary and biological discourses in that period.
Please see the link (http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/german/postgraduates/conferences) for registration, programme and further details, or click below:
Biological_ Discourses Prg (Final)
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Evolution - Cambridge University Dance Society show
Tue 20 - Sat 24 January 2015, ADC.
"Evolution. To develop, progress, metamorphose.
Join Cambridge University Dance Society for a kaleidoscopic evening of creative dance collaboration, featuring electric fusions of contemporary, ballet, Fosse, Charleston, hip-hop, Rock’n’Roll, ballroom, belly-dancing, folk-dancing, Indian and Bollywood."
Further details and booking here (ignore the quotation, falsely attributed to Charles Darwin!).
"Evolution. To develop, progress, metamorphose.
Join Cambridge University Dance Society for a kaleidoscopic evening of creative dance collaboration, featuring electric fusions of contemporary, ballet, Fosse, Charleston, hip-hop, Rock’n’Roll, ballroom, belly-dancing, folk-dancing, Indian and Bollywood."
Further details and booking here (ignore the quotation, falsely attributed to Charles Darwin!).
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Recap - What Mr Darwin Saw
Many thanks to everyone who came along to last night's meeting: there was a great turn-out to discuss all things Darwinian!
Julie Barzilay gave a fantastic introduction to the set readings, detailing her recent research into this topic, and providing some very helpful background information on Wendell Phillips Garrison, author of the original What Mr Darwin Saw. She explained how the book fitted with Garrison's other editoral work, abolitionist convictions, and writings for children, and drew attention in particular to his restructuring of Darwin's words into a natural history guide that taught children how to be observers, moving from animals to man to geography to nature. She asked us to consider what was lost, as well as gained, in this editorial process; and more generally to analyse the role of editors and their responsibility to - or exploitation of - works' original authors. In the thought-provoking and characteristically wide-ranging discussion that followed, many different aspects of this children's book were brought into question. How and by whom would the book have been read? What was its relationship with other types of children's natural history books, with encyclopaedias, with travel narratives? What kinds of scientific methods were taught through this work? How 'invisible' was its the editor, after all? What ethical considerations should we foreground when reading historical source material about racial difference, especially with juvenile audiences in mind?
In comparison with the more recent book which shares its title, we were also able to think about how the Beagle voyage has been rewritten for audiences today. Rather than Darwin the superlative 'see-er', as had been presented in the 19th century, we explored how Darwin the scientific hero was the star of this work. Published as part of the 2009 celebrations commemorating 200 years since his birth, and 150 years since the publication of the Origin of Species, a shift from teaching natural history to teaching history was, as we discussed, apparent.
Julie Barzilay gave a fantastic introduction to the set readings, detailing her recent research into this topic, and providing some very helpful background information on Wendell Phillips Garrison, author of the original What Mr Darwin Saw. She explained how the book fitted with Garrison's other editoral work, abolitionist convictions, and writings for children, and drew attention in particular to his restructuring of Darwin's words into a natural history guide that taught children how to be observers, moving from animals to man to geography to nature. She asked us to consider what was lost, as well as gained, in this editorial process; and more generally to analyse the role of editors and their responsibility to - or exploitation of - works' original authors. In the thought-provoking and characteristically wide-ranging discussion that followed, many different aspects of this children's book were brought into question. How and by whom would the book have been read? What was its relationship with other types of children's natural history books, with encyclopaedias, with travel narratives? What kinds of scientific methods were taught through this work? How 'invisible' was its the editor, after all? What ethical considerations should we foreground when reading historical source material about racial difference, especially with juvenile audiences in mind?
In comparison with the more recent book which shares its title, we were also able to think about how the Beagle voyage has been rewritten for audiences today. Rather than Darwin the superlative 'see-er', as had been presented in the 19th century, we explored how Darwin the scientific hero was the star of this work. Published as part of the 2009 celebrations commemorating 200 years since his birth, and 150 years since the publication of the Origin of Species, a shift from teaching natural history to teaching history was, as we discussed, apparent.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Easter Term 2014
Science for Children
This term we explore how scientific texts have been rewritten for juvenile audiences in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, as well as analysing a work written by two young people themselves. We meet on Mondays from 7.30 to 9pm in the Godwin Room at Clare College (Old Court).Organised by Julie Barzilay (HPS), and Melanie Keene (Homerton College): please contact us if you would like to join the mailing list. Copies of readings not available online will be put in the Science and Literature Reading Group box file in the Whipple Library. All welcome!
12 May: What Mr Darwin Saw
- Charles Darwin, Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world (1845 edn). Read the preface and chapter 1 (Porto Praya).
- Wendell Phillips Garrison, What Mr. Darwin Saw in His Voyage Round the World in the ship 'Beagle' (1879). Read the introduction for parents, introduction for children, pages 29–33 in Part I ('The Horse') and pages 92–104 in Part II ('Man'). Feel free to skim the rest of the book.
- Mick Manning and Brita Granström, What Mr Darwin Saw (2009).
9 June: Entomological adventures
- The Adventures of Madalene and Louisa: pages from the album of L. and M.S. Pasley, Victorian entomologists.
- Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, The Life of the Fly... by J. Henri Fabre (1913). Read chapter 7, 'The Pond', but feel free to skim the rest of the book as well.
- Louise Seymour Hasbrouck, Insect Adventures by J. Henri Fabre (1917). Read the preface and chapter 1 ('My First Pond'). Feel free to skim the rest of the book.
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