CFP - Copernicus and his International Reception

Copernicus's theories did not enter the scene of European thought (science and theology) without dispute. This volume of Intersections will concentrate on the debates it triggered and it is specifically dedicated to two aspects of the international reception of Copernicus:

1) the reception and criticism of Copernican theories in astronomy, philosophy, religion, art history, and early modern literature;

2) the biographical, literary, artistic representation and ideological appropriation of 'Copernicus the man'.

Among the main questions will be:

Ad 1) Why did Copernicus leave an open flank in this theories by numerous mathematical imprecisions and how did physics cope with this deficit? Did the pluralisation of the worlds give change to the diagrammatical representation of world models? By which temporal shifts did the various arts react to the Copernican model? Did the metaphorical language of the areas concerned change (the heavens, planets, satellites)? Was there a change in the position of the mythological figures in pictorial arts? Were there new allegories? How did the iconography of the heavens change? Is there a difference in the ways Catholicism and Protestantism reacted to Copernicus? What was Copernicus's influence on the utopian literature?

Ad 2) By which processes in early modern European science and literature did Copernicus and his theory become a pan-European point of reference within the history of knowledge and how was he re-nationalised in historiography and literature after the early modern period? How did this nationalist and/or ideological
appropriation of Copernicus come about (e.g. the reception of Copernicus in socialist societies)? What kind of reception is reflected in the various monuments and images of Copernicus?


INTERSECTIONS brings together new material on well considered themes within the wide area of Early Modern Studies. Contributions may come from any of the disciplines within the humanities. The themes are directed towards hitherto little explored areas or reflect a lively debate within the international community of scholars.

This volume will be edited by Thomas Rahn, Wolfgang Neuber, and is scheduled to appear in 2012. Proposals, about 300 words in length, should be sent (electronically) no later than September 1st 2010,
either to: Thomas Rahn trahn@zedat.fu-berlin.de or Wolfgang Neuber neuber@zedat.fu-berlin.de or Claus Zittel zittel@khi.fi.it

Centre for Material Texts - Inaugural Conference

5-6 April 2010, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

Programme and booking forms for the Centre's inaugural conference are now available to download from the website (http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=389#more-389).

With contributions from leading international scholars and current postgraduate students from a variety of disciplines, the conference will explore a kaleidoscopic array of current approaches to many kinds of material text. Among the topics to be addressed are: maps from the middle ages to the Ordnance Survey; material modernism; literary decisions and revisions; the materiality (or not) of film; writers' remains and their conservation; music, sound and urban space; the future of reading in the digital age; the printed image; publishing after death; border crossings in the history of the book; the current state of editing; and the relationship between writing and memory.

We are delighted to welcome Leah Price (Harvard) and Peter Stallybrass (Penn) as our plenary speakers. Other speakers include: Ardis Butterfield (UCL), Chris Cannon (NYU), Paul Chirico (Cambridge), Ian Christie (Birkbeck), Flora Dennis (Sussex), Juliet Fleming (New York), Heather Glen (Cambridge), Hugh Haughton (York), Rachel Hewitt (Queen Mary), Alfred Hiatt (Queen Mary), Sachiko Kusukawa (Cambridge), Samantha Matthews (Sheffield), David McKitterick (Cambridge), Molly Murray (Columbia), Robin Schulze (Penn State), Sujit Sivasundaram (LSE), Andrew Thacker (De Montfort), David Trotter (Cambridge), Patrick Wildgust (Shandy Hall), Abigail Williams (Oxford), Henry Woudhuysen (UCL) and Andrew Zurcher (Cambridge).

The conference fee is £35/£20 (unwaged). A number of bursaries, kindly sponsored by AMARC, are available for unwaged graduate students. Numbers are limited: please book early to avoid disappointment.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

CFP - The Life and Work of Jane Webb Loudon

Women & Science in the Nineteenth-Century: Science Fiction and Science Education

Leeds Trinity University College 27th-28th June 2011

Jane Webb Loudon (1807-1858) is a neglected figure of interest to a range of research areas including women’s professional writing, the promotion of science and women’s education and speculative fiction. She is best known for The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) and Gardening for Ladies (1840). The conference intends to explore the life, work and example of Jane Webb Loudon in the context of women and science in the nineteenth century. It therefore seeks papers from various disciplinary perspectives on fictional and non-fictional contributions by women to the formation of popular scientific awareness during the nineteenth century.

We welcome proposals for contributions on the following topics:
 Women’s Science Fiction Victorian Science Fiction Women & Scientific Research
Popular Science Jane Webb Loudon’s Circle Women’s Magazines Visualising Social Change Botany and Horticulture Children’s EducationWomen’s positions and voices within late Victorian science fiction 1850-1910 Nineteenth-century speculative writing Science & Social Reform Scientific Writing & the Periodical Press Class & Entry to the Professions Women’s Education and Science in Popular Fiction Women’s Gardening Vivisection Represented in Women’s Writing Gender debates in Science Fiction

Keynote speakers, Matthew Beaumont, Alan Rauch, Andy Sawyer, Ann B. Shteir

CFP - Poetry and Melancholia

University of Stirling, 8-10 July 2011

Keynote speakers: Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, University of London), Don Paterson (Poet), and Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton University). Other speakers include John Drakakis (Stirling University), Lorna Hutson (University of St Andrews), Ron Levao (Rutgers University), Cornelia D. J. Pearsall (Smith College) and David G. Riede (Ohio State University)

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the nature and representation of melancholia within poetry and its relationship to poetics and poetic creation from the Renaissance to the present. Drawing together contributors from Art History, Literature, Medical Humanities, Philosophy, and Print Media, Poetry and Melancholia will try to examine the variety of forms that melancholia has historically taken and extend its meaning beyond the social, medical and epistemological norms that had framed it as a sign of mental illness or a way of behaving to that of a cultural idea. We aim to define not only the different configurations and significance of melancholia as mood, feeling, state of mind, and a cultural outlook but also the role that modernity has played in its development from a medical discourse to a dispositional perspective.

Themes: Aesthetics: the sublime, art and longing, decadence, narcissism and loss, revelations of destruction, degeneration, eroticism, melancholy genius, nostalgia, spleen, the states of boredom

Affect: sensibility, solitude and alienation, despair, grief, suffering and sadness, distorted senses, mood as language, psychology, transference, the workings of sympathy, haunting and return

Biomedical sciences: clinical depression, malady, delirium, humors, mental derangement, physiology and pathologies of the mind, psychoanalytic workings of mourning, somatic conditions

Nature, Space, and Landscape: landscape and distance, the resistance of physical objects, conflicts with nature, interior distance and phenomenology

Poetics: creativity, idleness and labour, imagination, inspiration and delirium, the politics of form and genre (allegory, elegy, lyric, and pastoral, etc.), poetry's relation to the visual and plastic arts

Tradition and History: appropriations of classical theories of melancholia, the idea of tainted inheritance, the traditions of witchcraft and the demonic, the past as loss, writing and memory

Sociology: alienation, anomalies of self-consciousness and the will, fragmentation and conflicts of modernity, otherness, gender, class, race, sexuality, social role of the poet, suicide

Please submit 300 word abstracts for 20 minute papers or proposals for panels together with a short biographical note or CV to Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and David Miller at poetryandmelancholia@stir.ac.uk by no later than 15 January 2011.

CFP - Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2010

Diverse Engagement: Drawing in the Margins

• Do you work at the juncture of different disciplines?
• Does your work challenge dominant research paradigms in your field?
• Does doodling in the margins get your creative juices flowing?
• Does your research involve marginalised groups?
• How does your research apply to the wider community?

The theme of this year's conference reflects how research can take place in or across the margins of academic work. This conference seeks to investigate how one's work may interact with, challenge, influence, or involve the margins of different disciplines, paradigms, groups or individual practice. Drawing in the margins should be interpreted broadly as the focus of all areas of academic scholarship; this is intended to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of postgraduate work.

The IGC Committee welcomes papers from graduate researchers across all disciplines.

Abstract submission: please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words via the conference website www.igc2010.co.uk before April 18th 2010.

Dates for next term

Next term's readings on Fairy-Tales are in preparation: watch this space! Meanwhile, here are the dates for your diaries (due to bank holidays and things we've having a run of three meetings and then a creative-writing workshop): Mondays 10th, 17th, 24th May; and 7th June, from 7.30-9pm. We're also going to be meeting in a new venue: the Skillicorn Room at Homerton College.

Literary Engineering Workshop

Humanity Manse, College Bounds
University of Aberdeen

10 am – 5.15 pm Wednesday 17 March 2010

Organizers: Casper Andersen (Aarhus) and Ben Marsden (Aberdeen)

In association with the Centre for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy

Speakers for this workshop include:

Casper Andersen (University of Aarhus): ‘Engineering journalists and the British Empire 1890-1930: The case of Stafford Ransome’

Mike Chrimes (Institution of Civil Engineers, London) ‘Aspects of the literary output of British engineers in the nineteenth century ‘

Graeme Gooday (University of Leeds) ‘Righting wrongs and re-writing rights: Oliver Lodge & Silvanus Thompson’s alternative narratives of electrical invention’

Chris Macleod (University of Bristol) ‘Authorship, intellectual property and British aeronautical engineering in the early twentieth century’

Ben Marsden (University of Aberdeen) ‘Re-reading Brunel: cultures of reading and writing in early nineteenth-century engineering’

Frances Robertson (Glasgow School of Art) ‘William Johnson (1823-1864) and the “world of industrial readers”’

Chair / commentator:
Don Leggett (University of Kent)
Ralph O’Connor (University of Aberdeen)
Klaus Staubermann (National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh)

For further details, and if you wish to attend (places may be limited), please contact: Ben Marsden (b.marsden@abdn.ac.uk).

BSLS book prize 2010

The following books have been shortlisted for the British Society for Literature and Science prize for the best book in the field of literature and science published in 2009:

• Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Harvard University Press)
• Leah Knight, Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (Ashgate, Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)
• Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Palgrave Macmillan)
• Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (University of Wales Press, Gothic Literary Studies)

Reviews of a number of these books are currently available on the reviews pages of the BSLS website. The prize itself will be announced at the BSLS conference in April.

REMINDER: Register for the BSLS conference by 15th March. Details here.

National Science and Engineering Week Haiku Challenge

Joanna Rooke writes:

As you know, it's National Science and Engineering Week in seven days time...yey!

We're always talking about outreach and expanding our audiences, but I wanted to do a bit of "inreach" for the Week. Many of you will be planning events and activities but there may be some of you out there in psci-com land who feel a little bit left out - and I don't want that.

To get everyone involved and in the mood, I'm throwing down the gauntlet to create the best National Science and Engineering Week haiku - this could be about the week as a whole, one of the projects, your own event or anything around the general topic. All entries should be sent to nsew@britishscienceassociation.org and the deadline for entries is the first day of NSEW (next Friday 12th March) at 5pm. The winner will get a NSEW t-shirt and the glory of being master haiku creator.

For those who don't know: A haiku is a non-rhymed verse genre. There are 5 syllables in the first sentence, 7 in the second and 5 again in the last sentence

Visit www.nsew.org.uk for inspiration.

My (admittedly feeble) contribution is:

Big Bangs and Small Bugs
Hands on fun in the UK
I love Science Week!