The Age of Wonder - Royal Institution Lecture

The Age of Wonder

Monday 19 January, 7.00pm-8.30pm

Speaker: Prof Richard Holmes


In this lecture Richard Holmes tells the story of three remarkable scientific friendships during the Romantic Age in Britain. The astronomers William and Caroline Herschel, the chemists Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday and the medical scientists, John Abernethy and William Lawrence all challenged traditional ideas about human identity, morality and religious belief. They were pioneers in a time where distinctions between poetry, art and science were yet to take hold. Holmes presents an age on the cusp of modernity, when science and faith in God were mutually incompatible, and shows through the vivid dramas of his central relationships how ideas are nurtured, scientific discoveries made, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. This lecture seeks to answer questions that are as relevant to us as they were to Coleridge's generation: What are the sources of creativity? In what sense is there a human soul? Is it a fundamental mistake to regard science as a purely rational pursuit, or must we also recognise it as an imaginative and emotional one?


Admission: Tickets cost £8, £6 concessions, £4 Ri members. You can book tickets online at www.rigb.org or by calling the Events Team on 020 7409 2992 9.00am-5.00pm Monday to Friday.

Venue: The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS

For more information please visit www.rigb.org

Proof-reading - telling stories with numbers, telling stories with words

On Monday 10 November at 6.30pm the Royal Society, in collaboration with the Royal Society of Literature, is hosting Proof-reading: Telling stories with numbers, telling stories with words.

In Proof-reading Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time will discuss the interface between mathematics and literature with Professor Marcus Du Sautoy, author of the critically- acclaimed Music of the Primes, presenter of the current BBC4 series The Story of Maths, and recently appointed Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.

Admission is free. No ticket or advanced booking required. The discussion is open to the public on a first-come-first-served basis and doors open at 5.45pm.

For more information please visit Proof-reading: Telling stories with numbers, telling stories with words but if you have any further questions please email me on emma.skelton@royalsociety.org.

3rd November

The second meeting of term continues our theme of 'the science of education' with a story by Maria Edgeworth.

The good French governess (1801) is available here and the same edition has also been digitised by Google books. If you have difficulty downloading either of these, a version without page numbers is available here.

We hope to see you from 7.30-9pm in the upstairs seminar room at Darwin College!

20th October

Our first meeting of the year will be held on Monday 20th October, from 7.30 to 9pm in the upstairs seminar room of Darwin College.

All are welcome!

We begin our readings on the science of education with a French classic:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l'éducation (1762), Book 2, especially the discussion of children’s reasoning, which is pp. 89-126 in the Penguin edition translatedby Allan Bloom; pp. 63-107 in the Everyman edition translated by Barbara Foxley; and paragraphs 254-412 in the Grace Roosevelt translation, available online.

A copy of this will also be placed in our box file in the Whipple Library.

CFP - Phobia Conference

PHOBIA: Constructing the Phenomenology of Chronic Fear, 1789 to the Present

An international conference hosted by the Glamorgan Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science

Friday 8 - Saturday 9 May, 2009
The ATRiuM Campus, Cardiff

Keynote Speakers: Laura Otis (Emory University); Andrew Thacker (De Montfort University):

The history of phobias as disease entities is intimately connected to the phenomenology of modernity. Whereas the emergence of spatial phobias such as agoraphobia (Carl Otto Westphal, 1871) and claustrophobia (Benjamin Ball, 1879) coincided with growing urbanisation and the development of the modern metropolis, Sigmund Freud's modern subject theory situated phobia at the heart of his psychoanalytical practice ('Little Hans', Totem and Taboo, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety). The fin de siècle was rife with cultural and social fears about the present and the future, and the twentieth century-with its two global conflicts, its natural disasters and the threat of terrorism-has ushered in a period of postmodern panic. Fear and anxiety are omnipresent in the modern age. But when, how and why does fear become chronic, morbid or abnormal? And in what ways has fear been conceptualised by medical practitioners, cultural theorists and artists?

This interdisciplinary conference looks at the different ways in which writers, artists, historians, art historians, cultural and human geographers, scientists and medical practitioners have constructed, represented and theorised phobia and chronic fear.

We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of phobias and anxiety disorders in the period from 1789 to the present. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcome. Topics may include but are not limited to:

* spatial phobias
* biophobias
* social phobias
* phobia and the Gothic
* the fin de siècle
* phobia, modernisation and modernity
* phobia and psychoanalysis
* phobia and cultural geography
* fear of science and technology
* phobia, the senses and physical sensations
* phobophobia

The conference will include an evening trip to Cardiff Bay, home to Wales's iconic new architectures and a central location of recent television dramas Dr Who and Torchwood. There will also be an opportunity for conference participants to submit work for a special 'Phobias' issue of The Journal of Literature and Science.


Please send paper proposals of 300 words to Dr Vike Martina Plock and Dr Martin Willis at rclas@glam.ac.uk by 19 December 2008.

Proposals for panels (comprising three speakers) are also welcome-please submit the title and a brief description of the panel as well as abstracts for the individual papers.

CFP - The Two Cultures in Question

Art and Science Now: The Two Cultures in Question

Science Museum and Tate Modern, London, 23-24 January 2009

Call for Papers

On 7 May 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture in Cambridge on the subject of 'The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution'. A failed scientist and a moderately successful novelist, Snow drew on his experience as a Civil Service Commissioner to consider what seemed to him to be an increasing fissure between 'literary intellectuals' and 'natural scientists'. In part an attack on the perceived insularity, decadence and political sterility of the London literary scene, in part a complaint about the poverty of a humanities education and a demand for curriculum reform in schools and universities, the lecture was, most fundamentally, a critique of the lack of mutually intelligible exchange between the two cultures. As the 1950s drew to a close, Snow believed that only a national culture as aware of the importance of knowing the second law of thermodynamics as of knowing the plays of Shakespeare, would be fit to offer developing countries the scientific and technological solutions to poverty and deprivation that were so urgently required.

The London Consortium is bringing together the Science Museum and Tate Modern in a two-day conference to mark fifty years of the two cultures. Divided into a more specialised academic event and a more public occasion, it will consider the history of this debate, asking whether Snow's critique has been addressed by the increase in multi-disciplinary research, alongside the expansion of educational curricula and provision within science and the humanities. But in a world of increasing disciplinary specialisation in which there has been exponential growth of sub-disciplines in both science and the humanities, it will also ask whether the distinctions between and indeed within the two cultures might have become further entrenched. The most fundamental question this celebration of 50 years since Snow's lecture will ask, though, is how the terms of the debate may have changed.

We invite papers for a conference at the Science Museum on 23rd January 2009, that consider questions such as the following: How have new technologies such as the internet and new resources like Wikipedia reconfigured our sense of disciplinary boundaries, hierarchies of knowledge and the places where cultural capital is held? Has the new dominance within general culture of ideas drawn from the life sciences, molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry, ecology, epidemiology, and their unpredictable pressings upon fundamental questions of how and why humans and other organisms should find themselves and their relationships defined in particular ways, led to an ever more complex and porous boundary between science and the humanities? How are Snow's notions of disciplinary and national cultures to be rethought through the paradigms and politics of globalisation?

Please send 200-word abstracts for papers (20 minutes maximum) by November 1st to Dr. Laura Salisbury, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, or e-mail: l.salisbury@bbk.ac.uk

Michaelmas 2008

This term we will be reading about the science of education.

Copies of all the readings will be placed in our box file in the Whipple Library. Organised by Daniel Friesner (Science Museum) and Melanie Keene (HPS). We meet on Mondays from 7.30 to 9pm in the upstairs seminar room of Darwin College.

All are welcome!

20th October
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l'éducation (1762), Book 2, especially the discussion of children’s reasoning, which is pp. 89-126 in the Penguin edition translatedby Allan Bloom; pp. 63-107 in the Everyman edition translated by Barbara Foxley; and paragraphs 254-412 in the Grace Roosevelt translation, available online.

3rd November
Maria Edgeworth, The good French governess (1801). Available here and the same edition has also been digitised by Google books. If you have difficulty downloading either of these, a version without page numbers is available here.

17th November
Otto Ernst, Flachsmann als Erzieher (1900). Translated by H M Beatty as Master Flachsmann (1904). Available here.

1st December
Chas. Hope Semir, Driven to suicide! or, the life of an assistant master in a London board school (1889). There is a copy of this pamphlet in the Cambridge University Library, classmark 1890.7.610, order in Rare Books Room.

CFP - BSLS Conference 2009

British Society for Literature and Science
Conference 2009

The 4th annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science will take place at the University of Reading on 27th-29th March, 2009. Keynote speakers will include Dame Gillian Beer, formerly King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge; Patrick Parrinder, Professor of English at the University of Reading; and Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeontology at Cambridge. The Society invites proposals for 20-minute research papers addressing any aspect of the interaction between literature and science; collaborative panels of two or three papers; and papers or panels on the teaching of literature and science. We welcome work on literature from all periods and countries, and on all aspects of science, including medicine and technology. Presenters need not be based in UK institutions.

Please email proposals of up to 400 words to Dr John Holmes (j.r.holmes@reading.ac.uk) by Monday 1st December, together with a 100-word biographical note (or in the case of a panel, abstracts and notes for each speaker). Please send abstracts in the body of messages; do not use attachments. Alternatively, abstracts and proposals may be posted to:

Dr John Holmes
Department of English and American Literature
University of Reading
Whiteknights,
PO Box 218
Reading,
RG6 6AAUK

Please address any queries to Dr John Holmes at the email or postal address above.

Education, education, education

Further details of next term's readings will be available soon...

Darwin's Microscope

Congratulations to Reading Group member Kelley Swain, whose first collection of poems, Darwin's Microscope, will be published by Flambard Press in 2009. You can read more about the inspiration for Kelley's work on her blog. We hope to be hosting a poetry reading by Kelley in the future, so watch this space for further details...