Talk - The 'Ecology of Form'

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)

Talk - The Cambridge Philosophical Society and the invention of science 1819-2019

6-7pm, Wednesday 12 June

Milstein Seminar Rooms, Cambridge University Library

Free, all welcome. Booking required: www.lib.cam.ac.uk/whatson

Today, Cambridge is recognised as a world-leading centre for science, but it wasn’t always so. Dr Susannah Gibson discusses how science in Cambridge developed thanks to the work of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, and tells of the ground-breaking research presented at its meetings over the last 200 years, from Charles Darwin’s Beagle letters to Lawrence Bragg’s x-ray crystallography.

Talk - Cambridge Bibliographical Society

"Spiritus anima" – an unrecorded seventeenth-century alchemist's library at Clare College, Cambridge

Ed Potten (University of York) and  Dr Tim Chesters (Modern & Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge)

Wednesday 1 May, 2019, 5.00pm (tea from 4.30pm)

Milstein Seminar Rooms, University Library

The identity of the annotator of a collection of extraordinary seventeenth-century alchemical manuscripts, now in the Sloane Collection, has long eluded scholars. The recent discovery of a collection of sixty printed books in the Fellows' Library at Clare College, Cambridge, all annotated in the same characteristic hand, utilizing the same complex system of cross-referencing and the same approach to organizing and recording knowledge, casts new light on the Sloane annotator, his methods and his identity. Ed Potten (University of York, and formerly Head of Rare Books at the University Library) and Dr Tim Chesters (Modern & Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge) will share their discoveries about this enigmatic annotator, accompanied by a display of books.

Talk - Fantasy and the Anthropocene

Prof Brian Attebery, University of Glasgow

Thursday 24 January 2019, 16:00-18:00

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


The concept of the Anthropocene says that humans are primarily responsible for the current state of the world, and only we (if anyone) can fix it. In this talk, Brian Attebery will explore traditional narrative patterns and their repurposing by fantasy writers from J. R. R. Tolkien to N. K. Jemisin. Such patterns take on new purpose and significance in the context of species die-offs, climate change, and other human-caused alterations of the environment. Examples range from the killing of the forest guardian in the epic of Gilgamesh to John Crowley’s recent novel Ka.

Brian Attebery is the author of Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, among other genre studies. His work has been honored with a Pilgrim Award, two Mythopoeic Awards, and the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. He is a Professor of English at Idaho State University and editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He is currently working on a new edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home for the Library of America and as of January, 2019, is Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow.

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'

 

Song Seminar - Animal Choruses in Archaic and Classical Greek Vase Painting

Wednesday 21 November, 12.30-2 pm in Emmanuel College (Harrods Room)

Naomi Weiss (Harvard) – 'Performance, Memory, and Affect: Animal Choruses in Archaic and Classical Greek Vase Painting'

In this presentation I explore how ancient Greek images of choral song and dance—activities unified in the term choreia—engage a viewer's experience of musical performance. I focus in particular on a series of Attic pots, mostly from the mid- to late sixth century BCE, that show choruses of animals and animal-riders singing and dancing, usually to the accompaniment of a double pipe (the aulos). These pots are often assumed to be "proto-comic," appearing at the same time as dramatic festivals were developing at Athens. Rather than seeing them as records of particular theatrical scenes, I suggest that we should understand them as expansive and flexible in terms of the songs they convey: they can reproduce the phenomenology of an entire production as well as that of one moment within it; they can also suggest affinities to other performances of choreia, thus drawing on a broader choral repertoire. By evoking the multisensory, multilayered experience of theater, these vessels position their users as audience members once more. At the same time, by cueing a viewer's embodied memory of being a choral performer himself, they can draw him into participating in their own musical productions.

UCL Haldane Lecture: "Barnum, Pache and Poe"

The Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London hosts its second JBS Haldane lecture of 2018, with Prof. John Tresch (Warburg Institute) giving his talk on "Barnum, Bache and Poe: Forging American Science in a Media Revolution" Wednesday 17th October, from 6pm, in the JZ Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building, Gower St.

Abstract: Today's scientific and political institutions face severe challenges, nowhere more visibly than in the USA- where scientific evidence of climate change is scorned by a media-obsessed president whose heroes include the nativist demagogue Andrew Jackson and the con-artist P.T. Barnum. This lecture returns to the 1830s and 1840s, the era of Barnum, Jackson, and a communications revolution, to explore competing visions of the cosmos and of the relation between science and the demos in a moment of turmoil. Two opposed tendencies characterised antebellum public culture: first, a sharp increase in printed communication, with periodicals, audiences, styles, and authors exploding in number and diversity; second, a coordinated movement by educated elites to control knowledge through centralised and hierarchical institutions. In the sciences, the Lyceum movement and Barnum's "American Museum" typified the first, while the U.S. Coast Survey, directed by Benjamin Franklin's great grandson, the West Point-educated polymath, Alexander Dallas Bache, exemplified the second. The work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was shaped by both tendencies. Trained at West Point, Poe wrote frequently about the sciences, even as he invented new forms of literary sensationalism. He "forged" American science and letters in two senses: by supporting projects to establish a unified and regulated intellectual infrastructure, and by crafting believable fakes which fed popular uncertainty about authority over knowledge. Poe thus offers astute, prophetic, and dramatically conflicted commentary on science, its publics, and the stories it tells.

Public lecture: 'Paying the Tolls: Glass in Time and the Regulation of the Free Trade State', Jenny Bulstrode (University of Cambridge)

The Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, London: 1-2pm, Tuesday 21 August (doors open at 12.30).

Lectures are free and open to the public, but space is limited and booking is recommended.

For further details and to book please follow this link.

In the stores of the British Museum are three exquisite springs, made in the late 1820s and 1830s, to regulate the most precise timepieces in the world. Barely the thickness of a hair, they are exquisite because they are made entirely of glass. Combining new archival evidence, funded by the Antiquarian Horological Society, with the first technical analysis of the springs, undertaken in collaboration with the British Museum, the research presented here uncovers the extraordinary significance of these springs to the global extension of nineteenth century capitalism through the repeal of the Corn Laws. In the 1830s and 1840s the Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy; the Hydrographer to the Admiralty, Francis Beaufort; and the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, collaborated with the virtuoso chronometer-maker, Edward John Dent, to mobilize the specificity of particular forms of glass, the salience of the Glass Tax, and the significance of state standards, as means to reform. These protagonists looked to glass and its properties to transform the fiscal military state into an exquisitely regulated machine with the appearance of automation and the gloss of the free-trade liberal ideal. Surprising, but significant connections, linking Newcastle mobs to tales of Cinderella and the use of small change, demonstrate why historians must attend to materials and how such attention exposes claims to knowledge, the interests behind such claims, and the impact they have had upon the design and architecture of the modern world. Through the pivotal role of glass, this paper reveals the entangled emergence of state and market capitalism, how an exquisite glass spring set the time for Dent’s most famous work, the Westminster clock, Big Ben; and how the British factory system was transformed in vitreous proportions.

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.

Monsters and Me - Frankenstein and AI

The Peterhouse Theory Group

Our first meeting of Lent term will be 30 January at 17.30 in The Parlour (G Staircase).

• Sam Kennerley (History): "Collingwood and the Archaeological Approach to History"
• Josh Nall (History and Philosophy of Science): "Escape to Mars? Victorian and modern narratives of a dying planet"

All talks this term will begin at 17.30.

Wine and other beverages will be served.

2018 Sandars Lectures - 'Chemical Attractions'

By Dr Peter Wothers, Director of Studies in Chemistry at Cambridge.

Held on the 6th, 7th and 8th of March in St Catherine’s College.


Lecture 1; 6th March.

The first lecture looks at how a young teenager first became addicted to collecting antique books on chemistry over 30 years ago. We will look at some of the very first ‘rare’ books purchased, and exactly what the attraction of them was. We will explore some of the other great chemical libraries formed in the past, and their different ‘flavours’ and strengths. We will also discuss how book collecting has changed over the past 30 years, during the age of the internet – a resource not available to the great collectors of the past. Some of the treasures stumbled across during the time collecting will be exhibited and discussed, including a possibly unique broadsheet summarizing one of the first text books of modern chemistry from the beginning of the 17th century.


Lecture 2; 7th March

This second lecture looks at some of the key chemical texts from the 18th century, when modern chemistry really began. We look at how an understanding of the air and the different gases it contains prompted a revolution in chemistry with the introduction of a new nomenclature which is still used today. We look at some of the key texts by authors such as Cavendish, Priestley, Scheele and Lavoisier and how the modern theory and language developed. We will also see how a chance acquisition of an additional item thrown in with a main lot in an auction led to the identification and purchase of an important piece of scientific apparatus. The lecture will include a couple of explosive chemical demonstrations!


Lecture 3; 8th March

In this third and final lecture, we look at some of the earliest books written by women chemists, prior to Madame Curie. Particularly important is Elizabeth Fulhame’s book from 1794: An essay on combustion, with a view to a new art of dying and painting. Also examined are the immensely influential and utterly delightful editions of Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry published between 1806 and 1853. This book takes the form of informal dialogues, or conversations, between the teacher, Mrs Bryan, and her two young students, Caroline and Emily. We will also look at other books written for younger audiences and some of the dangerous experiments they encouraged their readers to try out.

Further information here.

Landscapes Below Speaker Series

Milstein Seminar Rooms, University Library
Thursday 25 January, 17.30-18.30

THE WONDERS OF THE PEAK: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY GEO-TOURISM IN DERBYSHIRE

Anna Rhodes, Collections Officer at Buxton Museum & Art Gallery

In 1636 Thomas Hobbes published his topographical and satirical poem The Wonders of the Peak. This popular verse described visiting some of Derbyshire's geological wonders, including limestone caverns and natural wells. Hobbes' poem publicised this landscape and by the eighteenth century, these sites were teeming with visitors. Descriptions and engravings of the sites were published in magazines and they attracted artists including Joseph Farrington, Philip James De Loutherbourg and William Gilpin. This talk explores how these geological 'wonders' were represented on both paper and canvas in the eighteenth-century. It draws on many unpublished travel journals, examining how the visitors engaged with the geological landscape. These often sensationalised descriptions, written by both men and women contain tales of perilous adventure, eerie visions into other worlds and the stirrings of modern geology.

Further information, and a link to book tickets, here.

Future events:

• 'The Role of Women in the History of Geology' - Tuesday 20 February
• 'George Cumberland, fossil collecting and landscape painting in early 19th century Bristol' - Thursday 22 March

All details and booking information can be found here.

Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network: Narratives and Artificial Intelligence

23 January 2018, 5-7pm
CRASSH, Alison Richards Building, SG1

Chair: Satinder Gill (CIPN)

The AI Narratives project at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence examines how we talk and think about AI, and considers the impact this could have on how it is regarded, developed, and regulated, highlighting the role of humanities research in technological development.


1. Stephen Cave: Hopes and Fears for AI: Four Dichotomies

Rarely has a technology arrived more pre-loaded with associations than the intelligent machine. We categorise those associations into four dichotomies of hopes and fears:

- Ease / Obsolescence

- Dominance / Subjugation

- Gratification / Alienation

- Immortality / Inhumanity

Stephen Cave is Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Philosophy, and Fellow of Hughes Hall, at the University of Cambridge. Stephen earned a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge, then joined the British Foreign Office, where he spent a decade as a policy advisor and diplomat. His research interests currently focus on the nature, portrayal and governance of AI.



2. Sarah Dillon: Displaying Gender

This paper will take a brief interdisciplinary and intersectorial look at the displaying and enacting of gender in artificial intelligence technology and the narratives surrounding.

Films: Ex Machina, Conceiving Ada.

Novels: M. John Harrison's Empty Space.

Sarah Dillon is University Lecturer in Literature and Film in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She is author of The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007) and Deconstruction, Feminism, Film (2018). Sarah is a Senior Research Fellow at CFI, where she is co-Project Lead on the AI Narratives project, with the Royal Society. Sarah is a public advocate for the importance of the Arts and Humanities and broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4.



3. Kanta Dihal: Personhood

Personhood has been attributed to objects from cars to computers to the Berlin Wall; the latter has even been married. At the same time, some humans have been denied personhood. This talk will explore the issue of personhood in the age of artificial intelligence, with the two robot figures of Sophia and Pepper as key protagonists... or objects of investigation.

TV series and films: Humans (UK)/Real Humans (Sweden); Ex Machina;

Kanta Dihal is the Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AI Narratives project, and the Research Project Coordinator of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. In her research she explores the public understanding of AI as constructed by fictional and nonfictional narratives. She has recently submitted her DPhil thesis in science communication at the University of Oxford, titled 'The Stories of Quantum Physics.




4. Beth Singler: AI and Film

Dr Beth Singler will talk about the series of four short documentaries she is making on AI and robotics at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, with help from the CFI, Arm, and Little Dragon Films. She will show the first half of Pain in the Machine, the first in the series and the winner of the 2017 AHRC Best Research Film of the Year award. She will discuss how the dissemination of accounts of artificial intelligence can rely on dominant narratives and she will reflect on science, fiction, her films, and their role in public engagement.

Pain in the Machine

Beth Singler is the Research Associate on the "Human Identity in an age of Nearly-Human Machines" project at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, where she is exploring the social and religious implications of advances in Artificial Intelligence and robotics. As an associate research fellow at the CFI she is collaborating on the Narratives of AI project, which is running in partnership with the Royal Society. Beth is an experienced social and digital anthropologist.



Chair: Satinder Gill

Satinder is a Research Affiliate with the Music Faculty, based with the Centre for Music and Science. She is author of Tacit Engagement: Beyond Interaction (2015), editor of a forthcoming book on The Relational Interface: Where Art, Science, and Technology Meet (2018), and member of the Editorial Board of the AI & Society Journal since its establishment in 1987.


To join the CIPN mailing list, subscribe here; to post events relating to the concept of performance to the CIPN mailing list, email here.

HPS Departmental Seminar - Making sense of art and science

Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent) will speak at the History and Philosophy of Science Departmental Seminar on Thursday, 18 January at 3:30pm on 'Making sense of art and science':

Historian of science Charlotte Sleigh has been working with science-artists since 2013, and in this talk she presents her reflections on hoped-for and actual relations between the two disciplines. A brief history of the field of A&S (art and science) will highlight the different purposes that art-science hybrids have fulfilled in different contexts, with particular emphasis on the past twenty years in the UK. Key concepts that have been marshalled to mediate between the two fields are subjected to critical analysis. A second part of the talk draws on Charlotte's particular experience in two A&S projects of her own: Chain Reaction! (2013) and Biological Hermeneutics (2017). In it, she reflects on some of the difficult and even embarrassing realities involved, drawing on Shapin's notion of 'lowering the tone' to help highlight some of the political tensions between art and science. Institutionalisation, money and space emerge amongst the categories in urgent need of more honest appraisal. Finally, related questions of research and critique are raised. There is a failure on the part of many scientists (just as there is amongst the general public) to understand and hence respect the research and critical practice that underpins contemporary art practice. What appears in galleries and elsewhere is the top tenth of the iceberg; research and critical practice are the nine-tenths that lie beneath. A&S collaborations may be improved, Sleigh argues, by an improved communication of this little-appreciated feature of contemporary art. Additionally she suggests that contemporary artists (as well as scientists) may have their research enhanced through an engagement with STS, which may be considered as the 'out-sourced' critical practice element of science.

Seminar Location: Seminar Room 2 Department of the History and Philosophy of Science Free School Lane Cambridge CB2 3RH

Tea and biscuits will be available from 3pm in Seminar Room 1. Following the talk, there will be a reception, also in Seminar Room 1. All are welcome! If you would like to join dinner after the reception, please contact Mary Brazelton.

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.

Migration: Arts, Humanities, Sciences

2018 Darwin College Lecture Series
Lady Mitchell Hall, Cambridge
5.30pm on each Friday of Lent Term

Leading intellectuals and public figures from across the arts, humanities and sciences will deliver a series of public lectures on the topic of 'migration' in Lent Term 2018. Speakers include historian and broadcaster David Olusoga, President of the Royal Society, Venki Ramakrishnan, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi.

Convenors: Dr Johannes Knolle and Dr James Poskett

For further details, please see the lecture series website.


Programme

All lectures take place at 5.30pm in Lady Mitchell Hall, Cambridge.


19 January 2018

Black and British Migration, David Olusoga (Historian and Broadcaster)


26 January 2018

Immigration and Freedom, Professor Chandran Kukathas (LSE)


2 February 2018

Art and Migration, Professor Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (University of Birmingham)


9 February 2018

Forced Migration, Filippo Grandi (UN High Commissioner for Refugees)


16 February 2018

Disease Migration, Professor Eva Harris (UC Berkeley)


23 February 2018

The Partition of India and Migration, Kavita Puri (BBC)


2 March 2018

Migration in Science, Dr Sir Venki Ramakrishnan (Royal Society)


9 March 2018

Animal Migration, Professor Iain Cousin (Max Planck Institute for Ornithology)

Talk - 'Five Shades of Gray: Galileo, Goltzius, and Astronomical Engraving'

1 November 2017, 17:00 - 18:00
Little Hall, Sidgwick Site

A public lecture given by Eileen Reeves, Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

No registration required. Please note venue location - Little Hall, Sidgwick Site
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Atrium of the Alison Richard Building.

Part of the Genius Before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art and Science project. For more information please contact Gaenor Moore.

Seminar - '*Dr Johnson after Thomas Pennant: The [Re]transit of the Caledonian Hemisphere.'

Prof Nigel Leask (Glasgow) gives the next18th-Century and Romantic Studies seminar:
Thursday 2nd November, 5pm, Board Room, Faculty of English. All are welcome.

"The paper explores the influence of Thomas Pennant's published Scottish Tours in 1769 and 1772 on the practice and representation of Johnson's and Boswell's Scottish tour in 1773, the success of which largely eclipsed Pennant's subsequent reputation. I will discuss the contemporary reception of both tours, exploring their itineraries, intellectual networks, and the composition of their travel accounts, as well as questioning a simplistic opposition between Pennant's favourable account versus Johnson's Scotophobia. The paper also examines their respective attitudes to the Ossian controversy, and to the Gaelic language, which inflects their otherwise similar criticisms of Highland modernity. The paper is illustrated with topographical images by Pennant's 'artist servant' Moses Griffith and other contemporary views of the Highlands."

Those wishing to undertake some preparatory reading might look at the following: Johnson's /Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland/; Pennant's /Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides/ (1772); Pat Rogers' /Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia/.

Nigel Leask is the Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely in the area of Romantic literature and culture, with a special emphasis on empire, India, and travel writing, as well as Scottish literature and thought. His book, /Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late-18th Century Scotland/ won the Saltire Prize for the best Scottish Research Book of 2010. He has recently edited the /Collected Prose Writings of Robert Burns/ for the AHRC-funded Oxford edition of the /Collected Works of Robert Burns/. He is currently CI of the AHRC funded 'Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour, 1750-1820' (2014-18) http://curioustravellers.ac.uk/en/ and is writing a book entitled /'Stepping Westward': the Scottish Tour 1720-1820/. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and is a Vicepresident of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies.