London Consortium PhD Studentship

The London Consortium in collaboration with the Science Museum invites applications to a new PhD studentship to commence in September 2009. The London Consortium Science and Humanities Studentship is offered to support projects of doctoral research into an area that involves or establishes a significant relation between science and the humanities. The award is tenable for three years and will cover the full cost of fees for a home student, or if awarded to an overseas student it will have the effect of reducing the overseas rate to the home rate. It will also include an annual stipend of £3,000 towards living expenses.

The London Consortium is a unique collaboration between Birkbeck College, the ICA, TATE, the Science Museum and the Architectural Association offering masters and doctoral programmes in humanities and cultural studies in an innovative, multidisciplinary environment. In the first year of the award the successful applicant will follow five core courses and a research methods course designed to provide a rigorous grounding in the key concepts and methodologies of multidisciplinary research. The doctorate will be examined by a thesis of 80,000 to 100,000 words, and will be awarded by the University of London.

The studentship will be awarded to a candidate who proposes an original and cross-disciplinary research project exploring the relation between science and the humanities. The student is encouraged to make use of the Science Museum’s unique collections relating to science, technology and medicine. With over 300,000 objects in its care, the Science Museum has particular strengths in the history of western science, technology and medicine since 1700. This collection is supported by the books, journals and archives which are available in the Science Museum Library. Interested applicants should apply to the London Consortium’s doctoral programme, indicating on the application form that they would like to be considered for the award. Applicants should have a good 2:1 (or equivalent) in a discipline relevant to the application.

Further information about the London Consortium can be found here. Enquiries about the Science and Humanities Studentship should be directed to Matt Taunton, admissions tutor, by email on matt@londonconsortium.com, or by telephone on 020 7836 7558.

CFP - Cultivating Empire

Cultivating Empire: Exploration, Science and Literature: An Interdisciplinary Conference, featuring the work and influence of Sir Joseph Banks

Lincoln, UK, 18 April 2009

This multidisciplinary conference will examine the intersections between the local and the global--the English shire and the colonial shore--in the years 1750-1850. Focusing on the relationship between Britain and the countries over which it extended its power, the conference has as its centre Sir Joseph Banks but also aims more broadly to present critical work in the following areas: the history of exploration and of colonial settlement (e.g. in Australasia, the South Pacific, Africa, India, the NW coast of America, the Poles, and in Britain itself); the development of colonialism as a system (for instance, the application to a global network of forms of administration and control pioneered on the English country estate); the cultural impact of the exploration and settlement of previously-unknown regions (e.g. in verbal and visual representations: art, theatre, poetry and fiction, journalism, travel writing, and vis-a-vis Orientalism, Omai, Tahiti,and India); natural philosophy in Britain and abroad (e.g. plant exchange, imperial botany, geological mapping, imperial medicine, the Royal Society, Kew Gardens, Hooker); agricultural improvement at home and in the colonies (e.g. Captain Bligh and the breadfruit scheme, the import and export of crops and livestock, the Royal Society of Arts); local history: the relationship of antiquarian study to the practice of natural philosophy in the empire; Sir Joseph Banks: any aspect of his life and work; archives and correspondence: the role of collections, letters and information stores, then and now, in knowledge-production and staging empire; the late eighteenth-century gentry as a class; the exchange and cultural meanings of technologies and objects

Submissions for 20 minute papers are invited from historians of science, literary critics, geographers, students of local history, garden historians, colonial critics and all others interested in the cultures of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent by email to tim.fulford@ntu.ac.uk by 1 January 2009.Venue: University of Lincoln/The Collection (Usher Gallery, Lincoln) where delegates will have a chance to inspect Benjamin West's great portrait of Joseph Banks before it leaves the UK.

Organisers: Neil Chambers, Sir Joseph Banks Archive, Nottingham Trent University, Tim Fulford, Dept ELH, Nottingham Trent University, Ian Packer, School of Humanities and Performing Arts, University of Lincoln, The Sir Joseph Banks Society.

Transcribing Tyndall

I've just come across the following blog, linked to the Tyndall Correspondence Project initiated by Bernard Lightman at York University in Toronto, which might be of interest to Science and Literature members!

Dates for next term...

... are confirmed as Mondays 19th January, 2nd and 16th February, and 2nd March, from 7.30-9pm in the upstairs seminar room at Darwin College. Details of the selected readings will be available soon.

1st December

Our final meeting of term will be held on Monday 1st December, from 7.30-9pm in the upstairs seminar room of Darwin College.

We'll finish our exploration of the science of education with Chas. Hope Semir's wonderfully-titled 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; or a photocopy in the Whipple Library Reading Group boxfile.

We hope you can join us for a glass of wine and perhaps a mince pie or two...

Dramatis Personae

Beddoes - Conference

Thomas Beddoes - Doctor of Enlightenment

Friday 12 December 2008 at 9:00am

A one-day conference organised by the Royal Society in conjunction with the Centre for Life Writing Research, King's College London.

Dr Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808) was one of the most remarkable figures in the history of British medicine. Part of a group of radical physicians friendly with Erasmus Darwin and the Lunar Circle in the early 1790s, he set up the Pneumatic Institution near Bristol where he attempted cures using newly-discovered combinations of gases. The then-unknown Humphry Davy superintended trials, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was among his patients.

This conference marks the bicentenary of Beddoes's death. Speakers will include Trevor Levere, Larry Stewart, Mike Jay, George Rousseau, Giuliano Pancaldi, Iwan Morus, Neil Vickers and Jane Darcy. Registration is now open, at a fee of £15, or £10 concession (students/retired/unwaged). Further information, a programme and a registration form are available to download here. Enquiries should be directed to Felicity Henderson on 02074512597 or felicity.henderson@royalsociety.org. For further information see here.

Next term preview

Next term we shall be reading novels about the history of science. For a head-start on some of the themes we'll be discussing (and an introduction to some of the set books, too), have a look at the recent Isis focus section on history of science and historical novels:

Jan Golinski, 'Introduction: History of Science and Historical Novels'

Kathryn M. Olesko, 'The World We Have Lost: History as Art'

John Gascoigne, '"Getting a Fix": The Longitude Phenomenon'

Lawrence M. Principe, 'Transmuting History'

Charles C. Gillispie, 'The Distorted Meridian'

17th November

Our third meeting of term will continue our discussions on 'the science of education'. We meet as usual in the upstairs seminar room of Darwin College from 7.30-9pm. We'll be reading:

Otto Ernst, Flachsmann als Erzieher (1900). Translated by H M Beatty as Master Flachsmann (1904). Available here and in the Whipple Library boxfile.

All are welcome!

Mary Anning - "The greatest fossilist the world ever knew"

The 12th Annual Robert Grant Lecture

Mary Anning: "The greatest fossilist the world ever knew"

Prof. Hugh Torrens

JZ Young Lecture Theatre, UCL Anatomy Building

Wednesday 12 Nov 2008 at 4:30pm

Despite the fact that she was an uneducated, working-class woman from Devon, Mary Anning (1799-1847) broke through the male-dominated field of geology to become one of the most important fossil collectors ever.

She discovered the first ever plesiosaurs, the first British pterosaurs and several amazing ichthyosaurs but she was rarely given the credit. A religious Nonconformist, who published nothing and travelled little, her life is difficult for historians to study but proves to be fascinating.

This lecture explores all of these problems, and outlines Anning's extraordinary achievements. Her work as a "merely commercial" collector of fossils opens up the complex debate about who is
amateur and who professional.

Professor Hugh Torrens, former President of the British Society for the History of Science and the International Commission on the History of Geological Sciences is the leading expert on Anning's life, and has published over 200 books, articles and papers.

Following the lecture, join us for a free glass of wine in a private view of the Museum.

This event is free and there is no need to book.

All are welcome.