Talk - 'Lewis Carroll and Darwin'

Children's Literature Children's Lives is pleased to announce our next event:

Laura White, "Lewis Carroll and Darwin."
 Tuesday 30^th May 2017 5:30 – 7pm.Room 218, Arts Two, Queen Mary University of London.

​

 

As has long been understood by scholars, Carroll's Alice books revel in complex jokes about Darwinian theory. But what did Carroll really make of Darwin's challenge to older thinking about nature, and what then are the satiric objects of his nonsensical jokes, such as the evolutionarily-challenged Mock Turtle? This presentation will examine the evidence concerning Carroll's views of Darwin and explore the nature of his jokes on Darwinian ideas.

Laura White is John E. Weaver Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the author of several books on Jane Austen, her last being Jane Austen's Anglicanism (Ashgate, 2011). She has also published widely on interdisciplinary topics in nineteenth-century British culture and literature, and has recently inaugurated a data-mining site on Austen's diction, Austen Said (austen.unl.edu). Her most recent book, The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World, is forthcoming from Routledge this spring.

This event is free but please RSVP
We look forward to seeing you there!


With best regards,

Lucie and Kiera

--

Children's Literature/ Children's Lives
childlitchildlives@gmail.com
https://childlitchildlives.wordpress.com/


Children's Literature/ Children's Lives is part of the Centre for Childhood Cultures

Noisy Embyros

NOISY EMBRYOS

Dates: 9 – 25 March

Private View: Thursday 16 March, 5.00pm

Noisy Embryos is a multi-channel, audio-visual installation that reflects on the relationship between scientists and the animals they observe by juxtaposing videos of snail embryos generated under laboratory conditions with the 'messiness' of the natural environment and of the process of data collection in the field. It draws on interdisciplinary research carried out by artists Deborah Robinson and David Strang and biologist Simon Rundle during field trips at locations used by naturalist Carl Linnaeus and film maker Andrei Tarkovsky on the Swedish island of Gotland.

Cambridge Science Festival 2017:

Noisy Embryos: From the bane of embryology to indicators of the Anthropocene
Thursday 16 March, 6.30pm-8pm

This interdisciplinary talk links the history of variation in embryology (Nick Hopwood, Cambridge) to the current use of embryos as indicators of climate change (Simon Rundle, Plymouth) to introduce how the audio-visual exhibition Noisy Embryos (Deborah Robinson and David Strang, Plymouth) responds to the uses of embryos in scientific research.

This talk will take place in room RUS110, in the Ruskin Building, no need to book, just turn up. 

We look forward to seeing you at the Ruskin Gallery

www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskingallery

Blog post - Dinosaurs, Evolution and Faith

Group members might be interested in this blog post by Richard Fallon on Henry Neville Hutchinson.

Discussion - 'The Hard Problem'

Tom Stoppard and David Sloan Wilson in conversation on the Guardian website here.

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:

• 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

 Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a short biography, to the conference organisers, Prof. Martin Priestman (M.Priestman@roehampton.ac.uk) & Dr Louise Lee (Louise.Lee@roehampton.ac.uk) by April 28, 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!).