Conference – The Open Ground: Biodiversity, Science, and the Imagination

Necessities of Conservation · Biodiversity & the Imagination · Biodiversity Futures

Bringing together the sciences and literary arts onto common ground to debate ways of mitigating the current biodiversity crisis.

Featuring an environmental art exhibition as part of the Royal Society of Arts Respond arts and ecology month.

Due to climate change, human development and other factors, it has been estimated that up to 22% of all living species may become extinct this century. Before humanity can properly tackle this impending extinction crisis, we must first consider exactly what this loss means, and reconsider how and why we place values on the natural world - be these aesthetic, economic, historical, ethical or sacred. By inviting together distinguished scientists and literary thinkers, this exciting event sets out to examine, through presentations and panel discussions, some of the most pressing concerns to wildlife conservation: exactly what species we should conserve, how we perceive the concept of biodiversity, and the potential future challenges we face in sustaining biodiverse life.

Saturday 20th June 2009, 10am-6pm

@BASH studios, 65-71 Scrutton St, London EC2A 4PJ

Featuring discussions with:

Ruth Padel award-winning poet, author of Darwin - a Life in Poems

John Fa Director of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust

Caspar Henderson award-winning environmental journalist

Armand Leroi BBC presenter, evolutionary development scientist

Melanie Challenger poet & former Writer in Residence for the British Antarctic Survey

For more information please contact events@conservationtoday.org or see here.

Book launch - The Darwin Poems

Emily Ballou will be launching her verse-portrait of Charles Darwin, The Darwin Poems, on Thursday 28th May, 6-7pm in The Meeting Room, Clare Hall, Herschel Road, Cambridge, with a reading and a wine reception. Further details of The Darwin Poems can be found on her blog here.

She will also be reading on July 15th at the Christs' College Old Library Garden Party, with a guided tour of Darwin's old rooms, recreated by John van Wyhe. This is a ticketed event - please contact Candace Guite at the old library if you'd like to attend (cjeg2@cam.ac.uk).

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award - Poetry and Science: The Case of Humphry Davy

Applications are invited for a fully-funded PhD award to study the manuscript and published poetry of the chemist Humphry Davy, 1778–1829. This collaborative award, to be supervised jointly by experts at the University of Salford and the Royal Institution of Great Britain (www.rigb.org), will involve the student spending one year based at the Royal Institution in London, transcribing Davy’s poetry and participating in the institution’s public-facing
activities.


About the project:

In his 1817 poetry collection Sibylline Leaves, S. T. Coleridge wrote that Sir Humphry Davy was ‘a man who would have established himself in the first rank of England’s living poets, if the Genius of our country had not decreed that he should rather be the first in the first rank of its philosophers and scientific benefactors’. Today, few people know that Davy wrote poetry, though he continued to do so throughout his life and left at least fifty poems in manuscript form in his surviving notebooks and letters. One aim of this project is to consider for the first time in a full-length study Davy’s entire poetic oeuvre, assessing from a literary critical perspective its content and technical form. It is hoped that the examination of Davy’s literary and scientific writings will involve the reassessment of the term ‘Romantic’ as a cultural movement, throw new light on literary circles and social networks in this pre-disciplinary period, and consider how Davy’s scientific practice differed from that of his contemporaries both in Britain and abroad, looking in particular at ways in which his interest in poetry might account for these differences.


Studying at the University of Salford and the Royal Institution:

The successful student will be supervised by Professor Sharon Ruston (author of Shelley and Vitality) and Professor Brian Maidment at the University of Salford, and Professor Frank James (Head of Collections and Heritage, editor of The Correspondence of Michael Faraday) at the Royal Institution. The University of Salford has particular expertise in the interrelations between poetry and science, supported by the Literature, Science and Culture research cluster in the Centre for Literary Studies.


Award and Eligibility:

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award schemes include fees paid at home/EU rate and an enhanced stipend/maintenance award for three years. Home/EU students receive the AHRC maintenance stipend, which in 2008-2009 (full time registration) was £12,940. Additional maintenance equivalent to £1k per year is paid in in-kind benefits by the Royal Institution as the collaborating partner. The award would commence on 1st October 2009.

The successful student must have completed, or be in the process of completing a Masters course from a UK University, or recognised equivalent. The student should have strong academic credentials, including an MA or MSc in English, History, History of Science, or related area. Preference may be given to applicants with a declared interest in heritage studies. The successful candidate must also meet the eligibility criteria for the AHRC; the Guide to Student Eligibility can be found here.


How to apply:

Application forms can be downloaded here. Please use the section asking for your Research Proposal to demonstrate your interest in the topic and suitability for the award.

Applications and a current CV should be sent to Mary Byrne, Postgraduate Research Administrator, Research Institute for Social, Cultural and Policy Research, University of Salford, Salford, M5 4WT. Please write ‘AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Studentship’ on your envelope.

Closing date: The closing date for applications is 26 June 2009.

Interviews for short-listed candidates are likely to be held in the week commencing 13 July 2009. The successful candidate will be required to complete the relevant part of the student nomination form for forwarding to the AHRC by 20 July 2008. Nominations are subject to final approval by the AHRC.

Further Information:

Enquiries should be made to Professor Sharon Ruston, s.ruston@salford.ac.uk or on 0161 295 5071.

The University of Salford and the Royal Institution of Great Britain are committed to an inclusive approach to promoting equality and diversity. We aim to have a more diverse workforce at all levels of the institution and welcome applications from people from minority ethnic backgrounds and people with disabilities.

18th May

Our next seminar will see the group travel on a magic carpet to Mars, as we join Lieutenant Gullivar Jones on His Vacation. As usual, we meet from 7.30-9pm in the upstairs seminar room of Darwin College. All welcome!

Edwin Lester Arnold, Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905)

Online text available here.

CFP - Dickens Day: Dickens and Science

Saturday 10 October 2009, London

G. H. Lewes famously criticised Dickens's failure to engage with contemporary scientific thought and proffer psychologically convincing characters, describing them as 'frogs whose brains have been taken out for physiological purposes'. Recent work, however, has significantly challenged
the truism that Dickens was indifferent or even hostile towards the scientific discoveries and discourses of his age. Dubbed a member of 'the steam-whistle party' by Ruskin, he was volubly enthusiastic about technological and scientific advancements and discoveries, including steam-driven modes of transport and manufacture, industrialism, geology, evolutionary biology and the mutual relations of humanity and animal life. He also had interests in mesmerism, phrenology and physiology. From his enthusiastic article 'The Poetry of Science' (Examiner, 9 December 1848) to Little Dorrit's fictional locomotive Mr Pancks, who 'snorted and sniffed and puffed and blew, like a little labouring steam-engine' and the 'Megalosaurus' stalking the opening of Bleak House, Dickens's oeuvre contains multiple traces of contemporary scientific thought.

This one-day conference seeks to explore scientific and technological ideas and metaphors in Dickens's novels and journalism and to place his life, work and thought in the context of Victorian science. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the theme and warmly encourage postgraduate students to apply.

Topics could include but are not limited to:

* Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary theories and metaphors
* Geology and palaeontology
* Hereditary transmission of behaviour and the biology of character
* Affect and emotion
* Inventors and new technologies
* Professionalisation and the emergence of science as a discipline
* Criminality, detection and forensics
* Physiognomy, phrenology and the science of the grotesque
* Mesmerism and spiritualism
* Psychology, cognition and mental illness
* Gender, sexuality and the science and politics of normalisation
* Energy and thermodynamics
* Vivisection
* Psychological (im)plausibility, melodramatic aesthetics and radical
politics
* The 'dismal sciences': economics, political economy and Utilitarianism

Please send proposals (maximum 500 words), together with details of your institutional affiliation (if any) to Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard, at hf35@le.ac.uk and jwiny02@students.bbk.ac.uk. The deadline for paper proposals is 31 May 2009.

CFP - Thomas de Quincey, Manchester and Medicine, 1785-1859

A one-day conference to be held at the University of Salford on Friday 4th December 2009

It has been 150 years since Thomas de Quincey died on the 8th December 1859: conference papers are invited on any topic concerning his work, Manchester, or medicine, during the period of his lifetime (1785-1859). Plenary speaker Peter Kitson (author of Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, 2008) will speak on 'Mr De Quincey and Dr White: The Racial Politics of Manchester Medicine', and Grevel Lindop (author of The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, 1981) will speak on 'Confessions and Case Histories: De Quincey and the Medical Sublime'. We are hoping to show an exhibition of de Quincey books from the University of Salford's archives to accompany the conference.

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to Sharon Ruston, s.ruston@salford.ac.uk, by 31st May 2009.

This conference is sponsored by BARS, the British Association for Romantic Studies.

11th May

Many thanks to all who attended last night's fabulous and thought-provoking discussion of Godwin's Man in the Moone!

At our next meeting we'll continue our theme of fantastic voyages by reading Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1864). We meet, as usual, in the upstairs seminar room at Darwin College, from 7.30-9pm.

The text for the reading can be found online here, and the scanned original manuscript here. Alternatively, you can 'turn the pages' of the manuscript on the British Library's site here.

All welcome!

CFP - Correspondence: Travel, Writing, and Literatures of Exploration, c. 1750-c.1850

7-10 April 2010

An international conference hosted by the University of Edinburgh and National Library of Scotland

CALL FOR PAPERS

The University of Edinburgh (Institute of Geography and Centre for the History of the Book), in collaboration
with the National Library of Scotland, is pleased to announce 'Correspondence: travel, writing, and literatures
of exploration, c. 1750-1850'--a four-day, interdisciplinary conference concerned with travel, travel writing,
and the associated literatures of exploration.

In bringing together scholarly perspectives from geography, book history, literary studies, and the history of
science, the conference seeks to interrogate the relationship between travel, exploration, and publishing in
order better to understand how knowledge acquired in the field became, through a series of material and
epistemic translations, knowledge on the page. Plenary speakers include Joyce Chaplin (Harvard University),
Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow), and Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent University). Proposals for papers on
all aspects of travel in the period in question are welcome. Preference may be given to papers which engage
with one or more of the following themes:

Travellers'  inscriptive practices

How, where, when, and why did travellers and explorers choose to
record the details of their journeys? In what respects did the  mode
and style of travellers' written accounts--whether rough notes,
regularised diaries and logs, thematic reports, or letters--discipline
their content and reflect their intended purpose?

Travellers' credibility and the veracity of written accounts

Given that travellers and explorers were only ever partial and
imperfect witnesses, how did they assure themselves--and, through the
published versions of their work, their audiences--of the truth? How
did their accounts correspond to the things they sought to describe
and understand? What were the epistemological bases to travellers=92
claims to truth?

The correspondence between manuscript and print

What were the material and epistemic transformations which turned
travellers' initial notes into completed, published narratives? Which
changes and adaptations were considered necessary in making the
transition from manuscript to print? How, in a pre-photographic age,
were credible illustrations produced in the field, and how did they
supplement and lend authority to printed texts?

Proposals of no more than 250 words should be sent to Dr Innes M. Keighren, Institute of Geography,
University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, EDINBURGH, EH8 9XP or by email to
innes.keighren@ed.ac.uk no later than 1 October 2009. The organizers hope to have a programme of over
twenty papers over the four days of the meeting (including plenary papers).

Organizers: Dr Bill Bell, Dr Innes M. Keighren, Professor Charles W. J. Withers.

Dark Matter - The Poetry of Space

The Institute for Astronomy, Cambridge.

Organized by the Gulbenkian Foundation

Tuesday 28th April; doors open at 7pm for a prompt 7.30pm start

What happens when poets and astronomers meet?

Astronomers Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Paul Murdin will be in conversation with James Fenton and Maurice Riordan,
with readings from Dark Matter: The poetry of space

The event will be chaired by the Director of the Gulbenkian's art programme, Sian Ede

Entrance is free and everyone is welcome

Conference - Mathematics and Fiction

The British Society for the History of Mathematics is holding a weekend residential meeting on the topic of “Mathematics and Fiction” meeting at Rewley House, Oxford on Saturday 30 and Sunday 31 May 2009. This meeting will explore the various uses of mathematics in fiction – novels about mathematics or mathematicians, and novels based on mathematical structures. We have an outstanding line-up of speakers, including novelists, critics and historians from the UK and USA. Don Knuth will be talking about his /Surreal Numbers/, which is the only time a mathematical theory has first been published in the form of a novel, and novelists participating include Andrew Crumey (“Mobius Dick” and “Sputnik Caledonia”), Nikita Lalwani (“Gifted”), Ann Lingard (“The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes”) and Scarlett Thomas (“PopCo” and “The End of Mister Y”). Contributions will take the form of readings and interviews as well as talks, there will be a bookstall and plenty of opportunities to talk to the writers about their work are planned.

Financial support is available for students wishing to attend – please contact the organiser at the email below.

Contributors are as follows:

    * Melanie Bayley (Oxford), 'Free will and statistics in /Middlemarch/ and /Jude the Obscure/'

    * David Bellos (Princeton), author, /Georges Perec: a life in words/, on the Oulipo

    * William Goldbloom Bloch (Wheaton, Massachusetts), 'Navigating Labyrinths in Jorge Luis Borges' story /The Library of Babel/'

    * Andrew Crumey, novelist, author of /Sputnik Caledonia /and /Mobius Dick/

    * Marilyn Gaull (Boston), 'Romantic numeracy'

    * Dorothy Ker, composer, 'the 19th step: Borges, Maths and Music'

    * Donald Knuth (Stanford) on his novel /Surreal Numbers/

    * Nikita Lalwani, novelist, author of /Gifted /

    * Ann Lingard, novelist, '/The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes/ (with a nervous nod towards quasicrystals)'

    * Mark McCartney (Ulster), 'James Clerk Maxwell: A Poetic Life'

    * Tony Mann (Greenwich), ‘Mathematics and fiction”

    * Scarlett Thomas, novelist, author of /PopCo/ and /The End of Mr Y/

Details, abstracts and biographies, and the registration form can be found here. Early registration is recommended. The meeting is organised by Noel-Ann Bradshaw (Greenwich), Raymond Flood (Oxford) and Tony Mann (Greenwich). If you would like to know more please contact Tony Mann (A.Mann@gre.ac.uk).