One-Day Colloquium - Theatrical Ecologies and Environments in the Nineteenth Century

Organised in conjunction with Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film

School of Theatre & Performance Studies and Cultural & Media Policy Studies
Millburn House, University of Warwick, CV4 7HS
Saturday 1 July 2017, 9am–6pm

All are warmly invited to attend this one-day colloquium on Theatrical Ecologies and Environments in the Nineteenth Century. Ecocriticism is a hot topic in both Theatre Studies and Nineteenth-Century Studies, yet the environment is still an under-examined area within nineteenth-century theatre circles. This symposium presents a series of panels and speakers addressing this topic from a wide range of perspectives.

Speakers and papers include:

• Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, 'Behind the Limelight: Theatre's Working Environment'
• Ann Featherstone, 'Sagacious Canines and Brave Brutes: Re-discovering the Victorian Dog-drama'
• Michael Gamer, 'Master Betty vs. Carlo the Wonder Dog: The Year of Child/Animal Actors'
• George Taylor, 'Stedman, Surinam and Theatrical Exoticism at the start of the Nineteenth Century'
• Cristina Fernandes Rosa, 'Nature, Ecology and Sustainability in Nineteenth-Century Ballet'
• Susan Anthony, 'Gothic Plays: Supernatural vs. Forces of Nature'
• Victoria Wiet, 'The Actress in Nature: The Environments of Artistic Development in Victorian Fiction and Life-writing'
• Katie Jarvis, 'Ecologies of Imperialism: Amazonian Waterlilies, Fairies and Inter-ecosystem Performance'
• Christina Vollmert, 'Staging Technology: The International Electrotechnical Exhibition in Frankfurt-am-Main, 1891'
• Evelyn O'Malley, '"Natural" Shakespeare in the Garden'
• Jiwon Min, 'The Melodramatic Ecology in Nineteenth-Century Theatre'
• Alexis Harley, 'Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology: the Geological Sublime and the Romantic Theatre'
• Victoria Garlick, 'The Broadhead Theatre Circuit: An Environmental Perspective'

The fee for this colloquium is £25 per person (reduced registration fee of £15 for PGRs), payable on the day. Lunches/refreshments will be provided; however, delegates are asked to arrange and cover the cost of their own travel and accommodation. Please note that the nearest train station to the campus is in Coventry. Link to registration, directions and accommodation details can be found at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/staff/jim_davis/theatrical-ecologies-and-environments/. For further information about this event, please contact Patricia Smyth at P.M.Smyth@Warwick.ac.uk or Jim Davis at Jim.Davis@Warwick.ac.uk.


Theatrical Ecologies and Environments in the 19th Century

Symposium - 'Synthetic Biology, Metaphors and Responsibility'

Event - 'STEM and Beyond? Informal Science Learning Across Disciplines'

Brunel University London, Friday 19th May.

We have fifteen presentations on STEM Communication, STEM and the arts, and STEM, social science and interdisciplinarity, including a keynote from Prof Martin Bauer (LSE).

Tickets are free but numbers are limited and registration is essential. Please register via the Eventbrite.

Further information can also be found on the Science in Public Research Network page.

Contact neil.stephens@brunel.ac.uk including STEM in the subject for further information.

Symposium - Planetary Logics

Call for proposals - BSLS Winter Symposium

At the AGM last week BSLS members agreed to trial the Winter Symposium as a postgraduate-led event. It is anticipated that this event would have a specific theme, and might also cover research training and career advice alongside showcasing ongoing research. As always, it is hoped that the event will have a 'non-conference' feel, and include different types of papers, panels, and ways of sharing knowledge. The BSLS Committee will support the conference organisers throughout the process, helping those with little experience to host a successful event. Proposals are invited from postgraduates, and from early career researchers who were recently postgraduates, for a themed one-day event to take place in or about November, to be emailed to Rosalind Alderman (rsaa1e09@soton.ac.uk) by 1 June 2017. Proposals should be no longer than two-sides of A4, and should include a theme and description, details of the organising group and location, potential speakers (if known) and types of papers, panels or other sessions to be included. The BSLS will award up to £500 in support of the symposium, which should be free to attend if possible.

CFP - ​Breath, Flight and Atmosphere: the Theme of Air in British Culture

Royal West of England Academy, Queen’s Road, Bristol, Monday June 26th 2017

Coinciding with a major exhibition – Air: Visualising the Invisible in British Art, 1768-2017  (June 17th – September 3rd) – the Royal West of England Academy is hosting an interdisciplinary one-day symposium in partnership with Oxford Brookes University.

Convenors:
Christiana Payne, Professor of History of Art, Oxford Brookes University
Sam Smiles, Professor Emeritus of History of Art, University of Plymouth
Stephen Jacobson, Vice-President, Royal West of England Academy

Air is everywhere. The air we breathe is essential to human, plant and animal life; its quality is a fundamental ingredient of our health and that of the planet as a whole. The air above us is a region of wonders and dangers: hot air balloons and aeroplanes, flying creatures and bombing raids, luminous colours and evocative clouds. It is not surprising that artists have often been fascinated by this kind of subject matter. From experiments with air-pumps in the eighteenth century, through the sky paintings of Turner and Constable and the polluted cityscapes of Grimshaw and Lowry, to the wartime perils and the exhilaration of flight in the paintings of Ravilious and Lanyon, British artists have found many varied sources of inspiration in the air.  Contemporary artists tackle similar themes, with an emphasis less on flight, which is no longer a novelty, than on the nature of breath and the connections between air and health.

This one-day symposium complements the exhibition, which includes works by Joseph Wright of Derby, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Samuel Palmer, John Everett Millais, Christopher Nevinson, Eric Ravilious and Peter Lanyon along with work by contemporary artists.

The symposium seeks to create dialogue between practising artists, curators, writers, academics and students from disciplines including history of art, cultural studies, geography, history, literature, environmental humanities and philosophy.

250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers should be sent to Christiana Payne at cjepayne@brookes.ac.uk, to arrive no later than Tuesday January 31st 2017.


Please contact the RWA for further information:
Joel Edwards, Learning and Participation Manager joel.edwards@rwa.org.uk
Royal West of England Academy, Queen’s Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1PX

CFP - BSLS Winter Symposium

The Politics of Literature and Science
Queen’s Building, University of Exeter, Saturday, 12 November, 2016
Organiser: Corinna Wagner (Department of English, Exeter University)

This BSLS Winter Symposium will explore relationships between politics, science, medicine, literature and visual culture. We will take ‘politics’ in both its broadest sense—considering for example, the politics of the body, the politics of scientific institutions, and how scientific and political discourse has shaped imaginative forms of expression (and vice versa). We will also take ‘politics’ in a more specific sense, to address how literary writers and artists actively intervened in specific medico-political debates, or how their novels, poems and plays acted as ‘mediums’ of scientific and political cross-pollination.
We would also like to invite papers that focus on the current field. What are the politics of researching and teaching in the field of literature and science? Contributors might want to reflect on engagement and collaboration, for example. The BSLS Winter Symposium will provide an opportunity for practitioners—artists, poets and novelists—and academics and theorists to share their methods and findings.
In terms of topics, contributors might consider how literary writers and artists raised and addressed scientific questions about, for instance:

• medical treatments
• the design of medical and scientific institutions
• the collaborative or conflicting goals of scientists and governments
• environmental policies and climate change issues
• urban reform
• social health reform policy
• the uses of statistics and data
• the scientific and political goals of empire
• the application of science to issues of race
• tropical medicine

One of the emphases of this one-day symposium will be the idea of transhistorical and transdisciplinary inheritance and exchange. For instance, how did eighteenth- or nineteenth-century ideas about contagion, excess, monstrosity, materialism, rationality, waste, dirt, geography or geology migrate between scientific, political and literary realms? And, what are the legacies of this migration? What historical continuities exist between past and present?
Lastly, we particularly invite graduate students to participate in a ‘policy show &tell’: these are 10 minute slots in which each presenter suggests ways their own humanities research could address or attempt to solve a current medical/scientific/health problem.

Please submit short proposals to Corinna Wagner on c.m.wagner@ex.ac.uk by 31 October, 2016

Workshop - Nature(s), Humans and God(s) in Literature. Representations

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP, “HERMOUPOLIS SEMINARS”, SYROS, 8-9 JULY 2016

“NATURE(S), HUMANS AND GOD(S) IN LITERATURE. REPRESENTATIONS”

The International Commission on Science and Literature DHST/IUHPST, the Institute of Historical Research/ National Hellenic Research foundation and the Hellenic Open University organize a two-days’ workshop to study the representations of Nature, Humans and God(s) in Literature. The workshop is part of the very prestigious “Hermoupolis Seminars” which have been organized for more than 30 years every July on Syros Island.

The main question addressed by the papers of the workshop will be the scientific content of the nature(s)’, humans’ and god(s)’ representations in all forms of literature.  Furthermore, the role or lack thereof of scientific accuracy in such works will also be considered.

The venue of the workshop will be the “Historical Archives of the State” in the Town Hall of Hermoulis. Hermoupolis was once the capital of Greece and a city of great cultural, scientific and industrial heritage. Syros Island is very close to Pireaus by boat and an ideal place for quality, inexpensive summer holidays.

Those who are willing to participate in the workshop with a presentation may send an abstract of 200 words to gvlahakis@yahoo.com or  until 30 April 2016. 

Languages:  English, Greek, French, German

For participants giving a paper there will be a modest fee of 50 Euros and for those who will attend without a paper a fee of 40 Euros to cover administrational expenses.  There will be some hotels with reduced prices on offer for the participants but there are plenty of places, in Hermoupolis or close by, with very convenient prices.

Coffee and refreshments will be offered.

Stories about science: exploring science communication and entertainment media

A research symposium at the University of Manchester
Thursday 4 and Friday 5 June 2015
We are now in a golden age for science in entertainment. Academy Award winning films such as Gravity and The Theory of Everything, and television ratings titans like The Big Bang Theory, have proved that science–based entertainment products can be both critically acclaimed and financially successful. In fact, many high profile scientific organizations including the US National Academy of Sciences and the Wellcome Trust in the UK now believe that science communication can, and perhaps should, be both informative and entertaining.

These groups have embraced movies and television as legitimate vehicles for science communication by developing initiatives to facilitate scientific involvement in the production of films and television programs. Science communication scholarship on entertainment media has been slow to catch up with the enthusiasm shown by these scientific organizations, as science communication studies of science in mass media still predominantly focus on news media and factual documentaries.

This Wellcome Trust-funded two-day symposium brings together scholars from across disciplines to explore the communication of science through entertainment media in order to uncover new ways of approaching, understanding, and theorizing about this topic. Our exciting range of speakers will explore science communication and entertainment media from a variety of disciplinary and global perspectives as it is practised and experienced by a diverse array of publics.

The event will run from Thursday 4 to Friday 5 June 2015 and is organized by the Science and Entertainment Lab research group within CHSTM, comprised of David A. Kirby, William R. Macauley, and Amy C. Chambers. There is no cost for attending the symposium, but spaces are limited.

Please contact the organizers if you are interested in attending, or if you would like further details: storiesaboutscience@manchester.ac.uk

Symposium - Teaching Literature and Science

The programme and website for the 'Teaching Literature and Science' symposium, which is to be held at the University of Westminster on 8th November, is now available here.