CFP - Literary Birds

Call for Papers: Literary Birds

A Durham University Conference

Durham Castle, UK, 11 – 12 October 2018

Keynote Speaker: Professor Simon Armitage


Throughout human history, birds have occupied a significant ubiquity in our physical and psychological existence. Our deep, yet conflicted relationship with birds is reflected in their enduring presence in the literary imagination from ancient to recent times. Leonard Lutwack notes that their ‘familiarity and transcendence have given birds a wider range of meaning and symbol in literature than any other animal’ (Birds in Literature, 1994). Paradoxically, as the non-human animal world diminishes in an ever increasing industrialist, capitalist society, human technological sophistication deepens our appreciation of its subtleties and complexities. This challenges the human-centric notion of a hierarchy of beings, which in turn persuades us to reappraise our ethical relationships to, and uses of, bird species. Current debates in Animal Studies and Speciesism encourage radical reassessments of notions of the literary animal, with the bird, arguably the most prevalent animal in literature, relatively neglected. Concurrently, award-winning literary output, such as Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014), and Nicholas Royle’s collection of avian tales, Ornithology (2017), confirm that the literary bird is just as potent now as it was for the Grecian songster.

‘Literary Birds’ celebrates avian literary encounters in their myriad manifestations. We would be delighted to welcome the submission of abstracts for 20-minute papers from postgraduate researchers, early career researchers, and established academics, which address the role of the bird in literature from ancient to modern times. Topics may include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• Aspects of the literary bird, such as birdsong, feathers, flight, and nesting
• Appraisals of and/or legacies of particular species of birds (e.g. the prevalence of the canary in nineteenth-century poetry and fiction)
• Biblical, mythic, and folkloric birds
• The bird in poetry and/or as poet
• The bird and utopian and/or dystopian literature
• The bird as gothic trope and/or the bird in ‘horror’ literature
• Bird symbolism
• The bird and gender politics
• ‘Othered’ birds and avatars (e.g. the parrot in Wide Sargasso Sea and Treasure Island)
• Film adaptations related to literary birds
• Literary-visual intersections (e.g. bird illustrations and avian ekphrasis)
• The prevalence of bird-related fiction titles
• Bird ownership in literary circles
• Literary birds in light of bird cultures, beliefs, and practices (e.g. hunting and eating, the emergence of pre-Darwinian natural histories, taxidermy, cabinet collections, bird ownership, and falconry)

Please send an abstract of 150-200 words, along with a brief biographical note (also 150-200 words), to the conference organisers, Professor Stephen Regan and Helena Habibi, by Wednesday 15 August 2018, to literarybirdsconference@gmail.com. We look forward to reading your abstracts.

CONTACT

Email: literarybirdsconference@gmail.com

Website: literarybirds.wordpress.com

Talk - The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh

Kathryn Aalto

Tuesday 01 May 2018, 17:00 - 18:30

Mary Allan Building room 104, Homerton College, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ

A. A. Milne's classic tales Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner have delighted readers for nearly a century. The stories' characters — Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore and the rest of the gang — are famous, but how much do we know about the setting, the Hundred Acre Wood? Join Kathryn Aalto, author of the New York Times best-seller, The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh, for a look at what we can learn from studying the intersection of nature and culture in Winnie-the-Pooh. Kathryn has taken thousands of people on nostalgic and vivid journeys into one of the most iconic settings in children's literature. Learn about Milne's extraordinary childhood in the natural world, conflicts he experienced as a father and author, and how his creative partnership with illustrator E. H. Shepard continues to enchant countless readers. Discover places that inspired the stories along with the forest's rare flora and fauna. Part travelogue and natural history, this talk weaves history with humor and birdsong with booklore as we learn how these masterpieces of children's literature were created. Leave with a new understanding of how the Winnie-the-Pooh books are field guides for 21st-century Christopher Robins — hymns to those days of doing Nothing yet learning Everything.

Children's Literature Research Centre

Andrea Wulf - 'The Invention of Nature', Science Museum, 30 May

Every two years, the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) awards its Dingle prize for the best popular book on scientific history. This year's winner is Andrea Wulf, who has written a wonderful book about Alexander von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature. Although she rarely accepts speaking invitations, she has generously agreed to lecture at the Science Museum for one of their Lates evenings on Wednesday 30 May from 7.30 to 8.30. Book here.

Conference - Remembering James Petiver (1665-1718)

26th April 2018
The Linnean Society of London

Registration Now Open - see here

This day meeting marks the tercentenary of the death of James Petiver FRS, an important but often overlooked professional apothecary and compulsive natural historian in 18th-century London. Petiver made significant contributions to multiple fields of natural history, above all botany and entomology. An assiduous correspondent and collector, he successfully cultivated sources of natural historical intelligence and material from the Americas to the East Indies.

Speakers will assess Petiver's life and legacy by deploying a range of historical and scientific disciplinary perspectives. On the 300th anniversary of his death, the meeting will set out to remember James Petiver:

• as a practising natural historian of substantial abilities and merit
• as a collector and cataloguer of natural historical specimens with enduring significance
• as a writer of both manuscript correspondence and published natural historical texts
• as an apothecary whose professional and private scientific interests mutually informed each other
• as a social networker both within London and across the globe
• as an historical figure whose legacy has been contested and which is ripe for reconsideration

Speakers: Dr Arnold Hunt, Dr Charles E Jarvis FLS, Sebestian Kroupa, Dr Alice Marples, Katrina Maydom, Professor Kathleen S Murphy, Dr Victoria Pickering, Professor Richard Vane-Wright FLS. Respondent: Dr Emma Spary.

Organisers: Richard Coulton, Charlie Jarvis.

Recap - Sea

Thanks to the mild summer evening, we were able to hold our last meeting of term once more on the margins of the water, in the riverside gardens of Darwin College. Marie introduced our two readings by Rachel Carson, taking us through Carson's career, the relationship between scientific practice and science-writing in the mid-twentieth century, and women in science. As the introduction to Lost Woods revealed: 'What is remarkable is not that Carson produced such a small body of work, but that she was able to produce it at all' (xi).

We thought about the literary strategies Carson employed in 'Undersea', and its similarities with and differences from 'The Edge of the Sea': her precision or vagueness, imagery and comparisons, and evocation of previous classics of scientific literature, from Lyell's Principles to Darwin's Origin. We discussed Carson's ecological and environmental awareness, and her striking early illustrations of the interconnected effects of climate change. We went on to consider what was known about the depths of the sea (or les profondeurs, in Marie's favoured terminology) at the time Carson was writing, and how new discoveries of phenomena such as hydrothermal vents have reframed our understanding of the deep as a more active and energetic place, rather than a gloomy stillness punctuated by monstrous creatures (pictures of which Marie showed us). Carson's mention of foraminifera provided Simon with an opportunity to bring along some fabulous actual and 3D-printed examples from the Department of Earth Sciences' teaching collection (photographs below).

Overall, a fantastic end to what has been a thoroughly enjoyable term's conversations on and around four marvellous readings. Next stop, Earth...

26th June - Sea

Our final meeting of our aquatic terms goes under the sea, reading two pieces by Rachel Carson: 'Undersea', from the  Atlantic Monthly (1937), 322-325, and 'The Edge of the Sea', an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1953). Both are republished in Linda Lear (ed.), Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999), or contact MK for a copy.

We meet at Darwin College in our old venue of the Newnham Grange Seminar Room from 7.30-9pm on Monday 26th June.

All welcome!

Job - Research Fellow, 'Land Lines: Modern British Nature Writing, 1789–2015' (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council)

Led by Professor Graham Huggan, with co-investigators Dr David Higgins (University of Leeds), Dr Christina Alt (University of St Andrews) and Dr Will Abberley (University of Sussex), the project’s main aim is to produce a co-written book, contracted to Cambridge University Press, on modern British nature writing, but it will also involve a variety of academic and engagement activities working with partners including the Booth Museum and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust.

You will play a full role in the research and impact agenda of the project. You will work with Professor Huggan and Dr Higgins to organise the project conference in 2018 and will play a key role in liaising with project partners and ensuring that the project engages academic and non-academic audiences. You will also be supported to conduct your own related research and publication in ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities.

You will have a PhD in English, with a specialism in ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities. You will also have experience of conducting research and the ability to contribute to the research culture of the School and other project-related bodies at the University.

To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact:

Professor Graham Huggan, Principal Investigator, email: G.D.M.Huggan@leeds.ac.uk

Cabinet of Natural History, Easter Term 2017

Group members might be particularly interested in Mark Wormald's talk on 8 May, 'Poetic electrons: Ted Hughes and the mayfly'. Abstract here:

In 1981, the artist Leonard Baskin wrote to the poet Ted Hughes with a list of fifteen projected poems about insects that would feature in their next collaboration. It began with ‘The Mayfly’. A poem with that title appeared in London Magazine in 1983, but was never collected. The central poem in Flowers and Insects (1986) which Baskin illustrated, ‘Saint’s Island’, incorporates several phrases and insights first used in ‘The Mayfly’. And in 1993 Hughes published ‘The Mayfly is Frail’, in a revised text of his collection River (first published in 1983).

This paper describes Hughes’s education in the mayfly. Like its subject, it had a long and hidden larval stage, but took memorable flight in a fishing trip to Ireland in May 1982, which ended at Saint's Island on Lough Ree. Two remarkable prose accounts of this trip are among Hughes’ papers in the British Library. Between them they shape a visionary narrative, beginning with an Oxford tutorial in entomology from his son Nicholas, and detailing Hughes’s attempts, in the company of a group of fanatical Irish fishermen, to catch lough trout on imitations of its dun, or Green Drake, and spinner, or Spent. The poetry that emerged from this experience is faithful to these circumstances but also transcends them, offering a powerful vision of ecological interconnection not just to lovers of poetry but to all those concerned for the health of our rivers and lakes.

Talk - Natural Histories and New World Fictions

Talk - Fantasy Worlds with Frances Hardinge

Wednesday 8th February, 6 – 7pm followed by a drinks reception

G07, Percy Building, Newcastle University

Join us for an exclusive event with Frances Hardinge, as she discusses the borders between fantasy and reality and her inspiration for her writing with Aishwarya Subramanian from Newcastle University’s Children’s Literature Unit. Her latest novel, The Lie Tree, described as ‘a Victorian Gothic mystery with added paleontology, blasting powder, post-mortem photography and feminism” won the Costa Book of the Year 2015 and audiences will also be treated to a reading from the outstanding novel by Frances as part of this very special event.

This event is hosted by Newcastle University’s School of English Literature, Langauge and Linguistics with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books.

Free event. Please book online in advance at: http://www.sevenstories.org.uk/whats-on/events/122952/fantasy-worlds-with-frances-hardinge

This event complements the Children’s Literature Unit’s Postgraduate Visit Day, which will be hosted earlier that day for prospective Masters and PhD students. For more information and to book, visit: http://forms.ncl.ac.uk/view.php?id=11282

Visions of Nature events - Oxford

This year the Oxford University Museum of Natural History has been hosting a series of exhibitions, events and residencies under the theme Visions of Nature. In December, BSLS members John Holmes and Janine Rogers will be taking part in three public events at the museum as part of this celebration of art and poetry inspired by the natural world:

• On 1st December (7-9 p.m.), John and Janine will be giving a joint talk entitled Building the Book of Nature, drawing on their research for their Canadian SSHRC-funded research project on natural history museum architecture. This talk will explore the architecture and art of the museum, including a guided tour and a pop-up exhibition of designs by John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites and others.
• On 7th December (6.30-8.30 p.m.), they will be joined by Stephen Wildman, Director of the Ruskin Library and Research Centre, together with researchers and teachers from Oxford, to discuss how science and art have worked together in visualising nature throughout the ages.
• Finally, on 12th December (7-9 p.m.), John will be joining the museum’s three poets-in-residence, John Barnie, Steven Matthews and Kelley Swain (one-time BSLS Secretary), to launch a new anthology of poems inspired by and connected with the museum, entitled Guests of Time.

All three events are free and open to all. If you would like to reserve seats in advance, please click here.