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)

CFP - "SCIENCE, IMAGINATION AND WONDER: ROBERT GROSSETESTE AND HIS LEGACY"

Papers are invited (for oral or poster presentation) for a conference "Science, Imagination and Wonder: Robert Grosseteste and His Legacy" organised by the Ordered Universe Research Project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, and the International Grosseteste Society. An interdisciplinary project is dedicated to new editions and translation of the scientific work of Robert Grosseteste. The conference will be the Fourth International Grosseteste Conference and will take place at Pembroke College, Oxford, UK, 3–6 April 2018.

The conference will celebrate the life and works of Grosseteste, especially in their response to natural phenomena. A principal aim of the conference is a confluence of disciplinary perspectives on this remarkable thinker. Submissions are welcome from all disciplines and from all career stages. Some suggested areas for subjects are listed below, but please be in touch with the organising committee to run ideas past us:

• the legacy of Grosseteste's thought in the later Middle Ages and beyond
• Grosseteste's predecessors and contemporaries
• textual and editorial issues connected to medieval science
• inter-textual issues across Grosseteste's writings: pastoral, theological, scientific and literary
• rendering medieval thought in images, diagrams and visualisation
• the extended legacy of the themes Grosseteste raises:

• the order inherent in creation
• questions of morality and science
• definitions of experience, experiment
• attitudes towards authorities
• education and pedagogic practice

• relevant thematic issues in history of science and literature
• modern scientific inspirations from medieval thinkers
• the role of wonder and imagination in science, in the medieval and modern periods

Oral presentations should be of 20 minute length, and the organising committee will also consider applications for sessions of 3–4 papers with potential speakers identified. Posters should be in A0 portrait format (33.1 wide x 46.8 length in inches), to be displayed throughout the conference and at dedicated Poster Sessions where presenters will be available to discuss their work). In all cases please submit a 300 word abstract with a brief academic biography here.

Please visit our website to find out more about the conference.

Lent Term 2018 - Aether

Following our tour of the four classical elements, this term the Science and Literature Reading Group looks to the fifth: aether. Our first three meetings focus on ways in which ethereal concepts have been used: as a vehicle for the imagination; as a medium for interconnection; and as a means of communication. The final meeting will celebrate completing the elementary series with a found poetry workshop using all of the texts we have read and discussed over the past year.

All are welcome to join in our wide-ranging and friendly conversations, which take place at Darwin College on selected Monday evenings from 7.30–9pm. The group is organised by Melanie Keene and Charissa Varma.

For recaps, further readings, news, and other updates, please follow us on Twitter @scilitreadgrp or follow this blog.

22nd January – Imagination

• Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’, (1773).
• John Tyndall, The Scientific Use of the Imagination (1870).

5th February – Connection

• John Davidson, ‘Fleet Street’ (1909).
• Oliver Lodge, Ether and Reality (1925), ch. 2, ‘Fundamental notions about an ether’, 33-46.

26th February – Communication

• Rudyard Kipling, ‘Wireless’ (1902).
• Philip R. Coursey, ‘Interplanetary Wireless?’, Wireless World (1920).
• Eric Roach, ‘Beyond’ (1950).

12th March – Elementary Poetry workshop

• Online introduction to found poetry, and examples.

Footprints in the Sand: the Hugh Miller Writing Competition II 2017-2018

Further details on the Scottish Geology website here.

CFP - Global Mountains

July 5-6, 2018

University of Cambridge

 

Mountains have long been sources of fascination, inspiration and despair, productive of distinctive ways of thinking and acting among inhabitants, administrators, scientists, travellers, and distant readers and viewers alike. ‘Global Mountains’ will be a two-day conference bringing into conversation scholars from a range of disciplines working on diverse engagements with and imaginations of mountainous regions. Geographical features, especially oceans, rivers, and islands, are now frequently deployed as productive spaces in which to reorient older national or colonial narratives. Mountains, long on the peripheries of states and empires as well as scholars’ attention, are beginning to receive deserved similar consideration. They are increasingly recognised as providing valuable lenses through which to examine political, social, and aesthetic issues. As areas of unusual ecological prominence and environmental agency, they are also vital locales for working through the more-than-human histories so urgently needed in the Anthropocene.

This conference will bring together conceptions of mountains as both subjects of enquiry and the settings of unique human and beyond-human stories across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. Key themes to be addressed include the importance of verticality in the history of scientific practice, the reciprocal effects of mountain environments and human cultures, and the roles of mountains as borderlands between states and empires (and thus as spaces that complicate national and regional boundaries). ‘Global Mountains’ will focus on uplands in contexts that transcend traditional area studies units, paying particular attention to issues of scale and exploring how high places became, and continue to be, units of long-distance theorisation and comparison. This conference aims to historicise and specify the means by which mountain spaces have been perceived and acted upon in ways that render them distinct from lowland settings. It will also investigate how social sciences and humanities might develop ways of ‘thinking like a mountain’, generating models and modes of expression that place uplands at their heart rather than conceiving of them as aberrations from norms derived from plains and oceans. Through these elements, ‘Global Mountains’ will seek to reorient understandings of global connections and processes from the flat to the jagged, and from the horizontal to the vertical.

We aim to facilitate discussion around, but not limited to, the following thematic sessions:

• Mountain Environments
• Mountain Societies
• Mountain Imaginaries
• Mountain Sciences
• Mountain Politics

This two-day conference will take place at the University of Cambridge on July 5-6, 2018. We invite scholars at all career stages to apply, and very much welcome interest from graduate students and early career researchers. We encourage submissions from scholars working on mountains in any related discipline. All speakers will be asked to submit their papers for pre-circulation in advance of the event, in order to facilitate in depth discussion, and with a view to publication. Please send an abstract (300 words or less) and a current CV to globalmountains2018@gmail.com by 15 January 2018.

Organised by Lachlan Fleetwood (Cambridge) and Thomas Simpson (Cambridge)

CamPoS seminar - 'What’s the Point of Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World? Travel, Science, and Thought Experiments'

6 December, 1 p.m., HPS department, seminar room 2 in the basement.

Emily Thomas of Durham will talk on 'What’s the Point of Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World? Travel, Science, and Thought Experiments'.

Abstract: 'Travel has a long and intimate history with philosophy. Travel also has a long and intimate relationship with fiction. Sometimes travel fiction acts as ‘thought experiments’, experiments that we can run through in our heads. This talk explores a 1666 fiction travelogue, Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World. In the novel, a virtuous young lady is kidnapped and travels by boat through the North Pole into a new world. I argue this is no mere piece of science fiction. Instead, this travelogue acts as a distinctly philosophical thought experiment, exploring the pros and cons of Baconian philosophy of science, utopias, and what it means to be real.'

CFP - 3rd International Conference on Science & Literature

COMMISSION ON SCIENCE AND LITERATURE DHST/IUHPST
Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6 (UPMC)
Hellenic Open University

3rd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE on SCIENCE & LITERATURE

2-4 July 2018, Paris, France

First call for papers

Following the successful two International Conferences on Science and Literature which took place in Athens and Poellau this Conference is the third to be organized under the aegis of the Commission on Science and Literature DHST/IUHPST. The third International Conference will be co-organized by the Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6 (UPMC) with the technical support of the Hellenic Open University. As it was the case with the first two Conferences, the third one does not have a specific theme, as its intent continues to be the creation of an open forum for all scholars interested in Science and Literature, thus bringing into the dialogue multiple perspectives. Nevertheless, the Conference will be organized along thematic sessions, according to the papers which will be accepted by the Scientific Committee.

Proposals for individual papers or panels of three or four papers should be submitted from 1st December until the 29th of February 2018. They must include the title of the paper (or the theme of the panel), name and affiliation of the author(s), an abstract of no more than 350 words and a short CV of up to five lines.

Proposals and inquiries about practical matters may be sent to gvlahakis@yahoo.com and konstantinos.tampakis@gmail.com

An international scientific committee will review the submissions and notice of acceptance will be sent within the first two weeks of March 2018.

Prof. Pauline Lescar will be the chair of the Local Organizing Committee and member of the Scientific Committee.



Registration: 1st February 2018 to May 30th 2018

Registration fees (include coffee, tea, refreshments and Conference material): 100 Euros

Fees for students and early career scholars: 50 Euros



Participants are asked to make their own arrangements concerning their accommodation in Paris, but the Conference organizers will be happy to give any necessary assistance.

Further information will be included in the second CfP which will be circulated on 5th January 2018.

New Journal issue - 'Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture'

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 25 (2017)

Cultural histories of nineteenth-century Britain have studied the important physical and psychological transformations caused by the industrialization of light. Gaslight, though discovered prior to the nineteenth century, became aligned with the era's narratives of national and industrial progress, an arc that, one might argue, culminated in the growing popularity of electric light at the end of the century. Yet, despite these new technologies of 'artificial light', 'natural' wood and coal fires remained popular in British culture. This issue explores fire as a visual and narrative technology in art, literature, and public displays by examining the ways in which fire evoked competing symbolic values, such as primitivism and modernity, vitality and destruction, intimacy and spectacle. The reading order mixes articles and shorter pieces together to demonstrate the continuities of fire across various sites, including: the domestic fireside, the tallow candle, theatrical conflagrations, Turner's fires, subterranean fire, solar fire, fireworks, funeral pyres, and a coal-ship fire.

• Introduction - Anne Sullivan and Kate Flint
• Animating Flames: Recovering Fire-Gazing as a Moving-Image Technology - Anne Sullivan
• Tallow Candles and Meaty Air in Bleak House - Anna Henchman
• Fire on Stage - Nicholas Daly
• Power, Creativity, and Destruction in Turner's Fires - Leo Costello
• Visions of Volcanoes - David M. Pyle
• Dirty Fires: Cosmic Pollution and the Solar Storm of 1859 - Kate Neilsen
• Fireworks - Kate Flint
• Victorian Imag(in)ing of the Pagan Pyre: Frank Dicksee's Funeral of a Viking - Nancy Rose Marshall
• While the World Burns: Joseph Conrad and the Delayed Decoding of Catastrophe - Jesse Oak Taylor
• Afterword - Fire - Isobel Armstrong

Read or download the articles here. Also see 19's Facebook page for updates.