Novel Thoughts: what Cambridge scientists read

Details of a new initiative exploring the reading habits of Cambridge scientists can be found here.

MAP - Poems After William Smith’s Geological Map of 1815

Two hundred years after the publication of the first geological map of an entire country, this  anthology, edited by Michael McKimm, collects new work by over thirty poets inspired by William Smith.

INCLUDES NEW POEMS BY:

Stephen Boyce ● Alison Brackenbury ● James Brookes ● Andy Brown ● Alan Buckley ● Peter Carpenter ● John Wedgwood Clarke ● Jane Commane ● Elizabeth Cook ● Barbara Cumbers ● Jonathan Davidson ● Isobel Dixon ● Maura Dooley ● Sally Flint ●  John Freeman ● Isabel Galleymore ● John Greening ● Philip Gross ● Alyson Hallett ● Ailsa Holland ● John McAuliffe ● Matt Merritt ● Helen Mort ● Andrew Motion ● David M. Orchard ● Mario Petrucci ● Kate Potts ● Peter Robinson ●  Penelope Shuttle ● George Ttoouli ● Anthony Wilson

To purchase a copy, see here.

A review by John Henry is on the History of Geology Group blog here.

Emily Dickinson's Herbarium

Digitised by the Houghton Library at Harvard here.

CFP - Scienific Utopias in the Soviet Union

Call for papers

Scientific Utopias in Soviet Union

Fiction, science and power

(1917-1991)

International Conference

Paris

23-24 SEPTEMBER 2016

Organization: Grégory Dufaud, Ioulia Podoroga, Larissa Zakharova

Scientific committee: Anna Åberg (FMSH/CERCEC), Korine Amacher (Geneva University), Catherine Depretto (Univeristy Paris-IV), Leonid Heller (Lausanne University), Alexei Kojevnikov (University of British Columbia), Nikolai Krementsov (University of Toronto), Valéry Pozner (CNRS), Egle Rindzeviciute (SciencesPo-Paris), Alexandr Dmitriev (Higher School of Economics - Moscow)

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, history of science has made significant progress. One topic however was disregarded: scientific utopia, fascinating and intriguing, because situated on the border between literature and science. Nikolai Krementsov is one of the few historians to deal with this topic. In Revolutionary Experiments, on the basis of several literary works, he focuses on medicine in the 1920s, further extending the reflections exposed in his book on Aleksandr Bogdanov. Unsuccessful rival of Lenin, Bogdanov abandoned political life to devote himself to writing. Through science fiction, he did not only expose his vision of socialism, but also theorized the role of medicine and blood transfusion in the transformation of the social world. As suggested by the example of Bogdanov, scientific utopia, as social utopia, offers an imaginary model for a new type of society and wishes to facilitate its realization.

This conference aims to understand how fiction, thanks to its heuristic function, managed to participate in the transformation of scientific activity and reconfigure science and power relation. First of all, we will focus on the relation between fiction and science, in order to explore how literature and film have taken over and readapted some of the concepts based on scientific discoveries and, conversely, how science used the imagery proposed by fiction to sustain its discourse, challenge its findings or launch the brand new experiments. This double movement is clearly mediated by power. This is why we will be attentive to the social command and the mechanisms of censorship at work.  

Through this relation between fiction, science and power we also wish to explore the idea of progress and its meaning during this period. If Soviet authorities made of science mother of progress, the belief in the impending communism started fading in the sixties. To what extent have scientific utopias reflected this evolution? What kind of imagery did they offer to the public? Utopias are rooted in the reality of their time and reveal its concerns. Then, what are the concerns they convey? Have they developed a discourse on risk that scientists would then reappropriate? For what reasons?

This conference addresses all the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (history, sociology, philosophy, literature studies, etc.). Every field of Soviet science, the best known as well as the most marginal, are to be examined. All works of fiction can be analyzed, as long as they fall within literature or cinema. Our focus is not one genre in particular (utopia, fantastic or science fiction), but a body of works of different status, whose common feature is the use and the reappropriation of scientific discoveries in order to imagine the future.

We invite contributions dealing with following questions:

1.                Scientific concepts and discoveries in fiction

–       variety of imagery proposed by scientific utopias;

–       discoveries and innovations at the heart of this imagery;

–       meanings given to the idea of progress;

–       fears and concerns expressed by scientific utopias.

2. Scientific utopias and science:

–       the role of fiction in scientific thinking and controversies;

–       the role of fiction in the reconfiguration of relations between scientific disciplines;

–       scientific ethics with regard to scientific utopias;

–       the use of scientific utopias in order to obtain recognition of a project by authorities or a scientific institution.

2.      Scientific utopias tested by the society:

–       spreading of scientific utopias and its audience;

–       scientific utopias and popularization of knowledge and techniques;

–       scientific utopias and power, the role of censorship. 

If you are interested in presenting a paper at this conference, please send a 300 word-long abstract and a short bio to the following e-mail addresse: sovietscienceandfiction@gmail.com by November 30th, 2015

The working languages of the conference are French, English and Russian.

Discussion - 'The Hard Problem'

Tom Stoppard and David Sloan Wilson in conversation on the Guardian website here.

A dramatic experiment: science on stage

6:30 pm - 8:00 pm on Monday 11 May 2015

at The Royal Society, 6 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1

A Royal Shakespeare Company event, in partnership with the Royal Society


Why does the story of a scientist, or topic of science itself, make for a
compelling theatrical production?

Join us for an evening uncovering science-inspired theatre.

Our panel will discuss why science stories continue to attract and intrigue
writers and directors, and the claim that such plays oversimplify
scientific theory in the pursuit of an accessible and dramatic narrative.

Hear from Tom Morton-Smith, writer of the critically acclaimed RSC
production Oppenheimer, Professor John D. Barrow FRS, a cosmologist and
playwright, Dr Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, a scholar of science in the theatre,
and Professor Marcus du Sautoy OBE, broadcaster, writer and science
communicator

Chaired by Erica Whyman OBE, Deputy Artistic Director at the Royal
Shakespeare Company.

Tickets for this event can be purchased from the Royal Shakespeare Company

A limited number of tickets may also be available for purchase on the door

Doors open at 6pm

Details here.

UPDATE (20/5/15): Read an article by Kirsten about these issues here; and apparently video from the event is also available here.

BSLS/JLS Essay Prize 2015

The British Society for Literature and Science and the Journal of Literature and Science would like to announce our annual prize for the best new essay by an early career scholar on a topic within the field of literature and science. The deadline for this year's prize will be 19th June, in order to give members time to revise papers presented at the BSLS conference should they wish to.

Essays should be currently unpublished and not under consideration by another journal. They should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words long, inclusive of references, and should be send by email to both John Holmes, Chair of the BSLS (j.r.holmes@reading.ac.uk), and Martin Willis, Editor of JLS (m.willis@westminster.ac.uk), by 12 noon on Friday, 19th June, 2015.

The prize is open to BSLS members who are postgraduate students or have completed a doctorate within three calendar years of the deadline date. The Prize committee will consider on a case by case basis whether to accept submissions from anyone whose doctorate was completed more than three years prior to the deadline but whose career has been interrupted during that time (due to illness, maternity leave, etc.). Those who have submitted to the essay prize in previous years are very welcome to submit again. This includes any previous prize winners or honourable mentions.

To join BSLS (only £10 for postgraduates and unwaged members), go to http://www.bsls.ac.uk/join-us/.
The prize will be judged jointly by representatives of the BSLS and JLS. The winning essay will be announced on the BSLS website and published in JLS. The winner will also receive a prize of £100. The judges reserve the right not to award the prize should no essay of a high enough standard be submitted.
The winning essays to date have been Rachel Crossland’s ‘”Multitudinous and Minute”: Early Twentieth-Century Scientific, Literary and Psychological Representations of the Mass’, published in JLS, 6.2 (2013), and Emilie Taylor-Brown's ‘(Re)constructing the Knights of Science: Parasitologists and their Literary Imaginations’, published in JLS, 7.2 (2014). Josie Gill’s essay, ‘Science and Fiction in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’ received an honourable mention from the judges and was published in JLS, 6.2 (2013). To read these essays, visit www.literatureandscience.org.

Talk - 'Darwin and Mechnikov in Tolstoy's Literary Imagination'

Thursday 23 April 2015 at 5:00pm in the Beves Room, King's College

Coffee and refreshments available from 4:45pm

Talk Abstract

Leo Tolstoy was a notorious critic of science as it was practiced in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, he was heavily influenced by newly appearing scientific theories. This talk explores Tolstoy's response to two of the most noted scientists of his day: the zoologist, Charles Darwin, and the pathologist, Ilya Mechnikov. Tolstoy frequently criticized both men in his diaries, letters, and essays, but their ideas helped shape his fictional works. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy used his two main characters to represent an acceptance and a rejection of Darwinian theory and, in so doing, highlighted the dangers of regarding it as scientific law. In his final novel, Resurrection, rather than making the characters' fates provide a judgment on scientific theory as he did in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy coopted Mechnikov's phagocytic theory for his own ends, making it the metaphoric basis for his moral philosophy. This offered him a way of synthesizing science and religion through art.

About the speaker

Anna A. Berman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her primary area of research is the family in the nineteenth-century novel, with a focus on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. She is interested in literary depictions of siblinghood, kinship, and forms of love that provide an alternative to the standard romantic love/marriage plot. Her book, Siblings in Tolstoy: The Path to Universal Brotherhood, will be published this fall by Northwestern University Press. Recently, she has begun to research the links between nineteenth-century conceptions of the family and the scientific theories of Charles Darwin and Ilya Mechnikov. Berman also studies Russian opera, with a particular interest in adaptations of literary texts.

Easter Term 2015

This term we will not be holding a formal series of seminars, but instead focus on more social events in Cambridge's scientific spaces and places. We will visit several local sites (including the Sedgwick Museum, Botanic Gardens and Institute of Astronomy), for readings and discussion of appropriate related texts.
For further details as and when they become available, please watch out for updates on this blog, or email Melanie to join our mailing list.

Call for suggestions - novels, politics and technology

Georgina Voss has a post on the Guardian website today asking for suggestions of 'the best fiction books with something to say about the politics of science and technology'. Read it (and contribute) here.