Building Interdisciplinary Bridges Across Cultures - October 2014

CFP - Two BSLS events

British Society for Literature and Science - Symposium on Teaching
University of Westminster, Regent Street, London – 8^th November, 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION

Literature and Science is currently gaining popularity amongst undergraduates, but opportunities for discussing how – and why – to teach it remain thin on the ground. This one-day symposium, led by the British Society for Literature and Science with support from Westminster’s Centre for the Study of Science and Imagination, is designed to help further that discussion.

We are keen to hear from as many different perspectives as possible, and therefore invite contributions from anyone with experience as a teacher, postgraduate teaching assistant, student, or administrator of an undergraduate course on (or containing elements of) Literature and Science, broadly defined.
For this event, we have adopted a different format from the standard academic twenty-minute conference paper, and will ask speakers to present in a more informal tone and for different lengths of time depending on the session. These shorter, less formal presentations will minimise preparation time for speakers as well as increasing discussion time for all participants.

With this low-preparation, discursive format in mind, we warmly solicit expressions of interest (not more than 200 words, including a brief biography and details of experience with Literature and Science teaching) from potential speakers. These should be sent to Dr. Will Tattersdill (w.j.tattersdill@bham.ac.uk) not later than October 10^th 2014. Subjects we are anxious to discuss include, but are not limited to:

• Why Literature and Science is worth teaching to undergraduates (and why it might not be)
• Reflections on how, if at all, Literature and Science needs to be taught differently from other undergraduate programmes.
• Particular difficulties encountered in convening a Literature and Science course, be they conceptual, administrative, logistical, or pedagogical.
• Experiences collaborating with academic staff from other disciplines, including the sciences.
• Student reactions to Literature and Science material, positive and negative.

We are committed to inviting contributions from those teaching literature and science across all historical periods, working across international educational contexts as well as within the British higher education system. There will be invited speakers as well as this open call, and current undergraduates will hopefully be among the delegates.

Many of us teach literature and science on our own initiative, coping individually with both the joys and challenges raised by the endeavour. This is an important chance to consolidate those experiences and build strategies – and collegial networks – which will continue to drive the field forward at its grass roots: undergraduate teaching.

Cian Duffy (St. Mary’s)
Allyson Purcell-Davis (St. Mary’s)
Janine Rogers (Mt. Allison)
Will Tattersdill (Birmingham)
Martin Willis (Westminster)


British Society for Literature and Science - Annual Conference 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS

The tenth annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science will take place at the University of Liverpool, on 16-18 April 2015. Keynote talks will be given by Professor Keith Barnham (Imperial College London), Dr Patricia Fara (University of Cambridge), and Dr Claire Preston (Queen Mary University of London).

The BSLS invites proposals for twenty-minute papers, or panels of three papers, on any subjects within the field of literature and science. In addition, ‘flash talks’ of up to 7 minutes on any topic are invited for a special plenary session. Other formats are also welcomed, but please email your suggestion to the organisers (via bsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk) for consideration, well in advance of the submission deadline.

This year the organisers would particularly welcome proposals addressing the themes of light, optics, vision and colour, and proposals for papers, panels or roundtables on engaging the public with literature and science research. However, the BSLS remains committed to supporting and showcasing work on all aspects of literature – including comparative literature and European and world literatures – and science, medicine and technology.

Proposals of no more than 250 words, together with the name and institutional affiliation of the speaker, and a biographical note of around 50 words, should be sent in the body of messages (not in attachments) to bsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk. Proposals for panels should include a separate proposal and biographical note for each paper. The closing date for submissions is Friday 5 December 2014.

The conference fee will be waived for two graduate students in exchange for written reports on the conference, to be published in the BSLS Newsletter. If you are interested in being selected for one of these awards, please mention this when sending in your proposal. To qualify you will need to be registered for a postgraduate degree at the time of the conference.

Accommodation: please note that those attending the conference will need to make their own arrangements for accommodation. Information on local hotels will be made available soon on the forthcoming conference website.

Membership: conference delegates will need to register as members of the BSLS (annual membership: £25 waged/ £10 unwaged). It will be possible to join the BSLS when registering for the conference online.
For further information and updates about the conference, please contact Greg Lynall (bsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk). A conference website will be available in due course.

Radio play - 'The Chemistry Between Them'

This afternoon’s play at 2.15pm on Radio 4 is ‘The Chemistry Between Them’ by Adam Ganz, which explores the relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Dorothy Hodgkin. Details here. 

There is an article by Alice Bell on the play here, and a response by Katharine Hodgkin, Dorothy's granddaughter, here.

Jon Agar's article on 'Thatcher, Scientist', is available here.

Science and Literature Festival - UCL, 6th September

On 6 September 2014, University College London hosts a new Science and Literature Festival organised by The Memory Network:  ‘Memory in the twenty-first century’, featuring, in conversation:

• Ian McEwan & Paul Bloom (Yale, USA)
• Suzanne Corkin (MIT, USA) & Hugo Spiers (UCL)
• Maud Casey, Timothy J. Jarvis & Sebastian Groes (Roehampton)
• Anna Stothard & Jason Tougaw (CUNY, USA)
• Naomi Alderman & Jessica Bland (Nesta)

The Memory Network is a research networking organisation funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Wellcome Trust, bringing scientists, scholars and writers together to think about memory in new, twenty-first century contexts.
In association with The Guardian, The Memory Network is organising a festival at which writers discuss the relationship between storytelling and memory in dialogue with a neuroscientist, technology futures specialist, and a neuro-literary critic. How does the digital environment change our memory and storytelling? Can you tell a story via objects? In what ways is psychiatry dependent on fictional narratives? How can we turn the life of an amnesiac man into a story worth remembering? These and many other questions will be debated, whilst neuropsychologist Paul Bloom will interrogate one of the finest, and most provocative, contemporary writers who throughout his career has sought to realign the fraught relationship between literature and science: Ian McEwan.
The literary festival is held in the Gustave Tuck lecture theatre at UCL, starts at 12.30. The programme finishes at 6pm. Entry is free but seats must be reserved by sending an email to memorynetwork@roehampton.ac.uk.

Commission on Science and Literature Inaugural Conference - Report

As the July sun baked the Athens streets, delegates attending the first conference of the International Commission on Science and Literature sheltered behind the doors of the Hellenic Research Institute, taking refuge in its (mostly) air-conditioned seats. We were there to hear papers on topics from plague to cyberpunk, given by presenters hailing from Austria to Australia, at an event which certainly lived up to its global billing, and to its wide disciplinary remit.

Listening to the talks, we met old favourites such as Charles Dickens and Emily Dickinson, but were taught to think of them in new ways: seeing, for instance, the Darwinian themes in Dickinson’s verses, as James Levernier emphasised; or, as Helen Goodman revealed, the layers of grief and masculinity in Dombey and Son. Ryan Sweet’s engaging tour of adventure fiction revisited some childhood classics, but from the novel angle of the history of disability: what was the significance of these particularly prosthetic pirates, from Long John Silver to Captain Hook?

Other talks focused more explicitly on discussions over what science and its practitioners and audiences could be: who could be involved, and in what ways? Gunhild Berg, for instance, analysed German portrayals of both magicians and men of science, demonstrating how fictional writing was used to challenge easy distinctions between the two. For Claire Jones, the gender of scientific practitioners formed the starting-point of her analysis, as she discussed anxieties over women’s laboratory research, introducing in particular a deeper consideration of The Call, a thinly-veiled biography of Hertha Ayrton.

The process and form of both science and literature were also key areas of analysis: Rachel Crossland fascinatingly explored how periodicals in the early twentieth-century reported on science ‘in progress’; in Will Tattersdill’s bravura analysis, the tricky generic categorisation of a marvellous monster story revealed the unstable nature of the literary, scientific, and physical forms under consideration in late nineteenth-century palaeontology. Clare Stainthorp, meanwhile, elegantly introduced the unified scientific philosophy of Constance Naden, looking in depth at her poetic output.

Some of the most interesting talks engaged closely with particular national contexts: Kostas Tampakis, for instance, revealed that it was not only the boundary between science and literature that was called into dispute by nineteenth-century Greek professor-poets but also national and natural boundaries: the scientific domain undermined, they argued, Ottoman claims to territory that was ‘naturally’ Greek. The French ‘anticipation’ fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also, as Valérie Stiénon, Christèle Couleau, and Claire Barel-Moisan demonstrated in their panel, drawn from specific Parisian journalistic and scientific anxieties of the day.

Claire’s paper on the delightful illustrations by Robida confirmed the importance of considering images and material forms of texts alongside their words. Indeed, historical predictions of what form the book might yet take was central to Valérie’s argument: would we soon be able to touch or even smell stories? A presentation by Fay Tsitou of her charming toy theatre show on the Greek language (and our many Greek terms for scientific objects and concepts), “τῆλε, τήλε…, tele…”, affirmed the effectiveness of multisensory approaches.

Overall, the truly international scope was the great strength of this event: the impressive range of topics but also the backgrounds of participants demonstrated the value of global comparison and connection. My particular thanks go to George Vlahakis and Kostas Tampakis as well as the rest of the organising team for their wonderful hospitality and lunch-wrangling. Watch out for news of the next CoSciLit event, scheduled for 2016.

Clare Hall Event - Gillian Beer and Louise Ells in conversation on Alice Munro

Thursday 3rd July, 1.15pm. Further details here.

Poetry Foundation - 'Sciences'

The Poetry Foundation website has a wonderful collection of poems online under their 'Sciences' theme: take a look!

Recap - Entomological Adventures

Many thanks to everyone who came along and contributed to last night's discussion! Building on the previous meeting, we continued to talk about children's natural history books, and saw the academic year out in style with suitably entomological refreshments.

The introduction and subsequent conversation touched on many crucial themes for literature and science scholarship, from anecdote, antagonists, and autobiography, to childhood and colonialism, objectivity and observation, changes of scale and moments of wonder. We thought about these works in relation to the contemporary rise of Nature Study in Britain and American, situating the pond-dipping anecdotes of Fabre, in particular, against attempts to teach children through 'Nature, not books', and against other attempts such as the Boy Scout movement to engage young groups with their surrounding worlds. We considered Fabre's work as a nostalgic piece of writing, looking back on his earliest natural historical experiences, and characteristic of his particular blend of the personal and informal with the scientifically-specific, as - for instance - when he pulled focus at the end of the 'pond' chapter to consider the planet as a whole. What connections could we draw, we wondered, to the development of ecological and ethological sciences? We also analysed Madalene and Louisa as a work of the 1980s, looking back at the Victorian period: its connections to nineteenth-century domestic practices of watercolours, scapbooks, and Brontesque juvenilia, as well as to comic journalism and - back in the twentieth century - graphic novels; the surprising, perhaps, subversion of the received view of dour Victorian childhood.

Many thanks to Daniel for alerting us to the existence of Maya the bee and her own Adventures: there is a 1922 English translation (with beautiful illustrations) available here.

See below for some photos of the group in action, of some of the texts we looked at, and - of course - of the creepy-crawly catering.

British Library - Discovering Literature

The British Library has recently launched an excellent new online resource on Romantic and Victorian literature from its collections, with introductory essays from leading scholars. One of their key themes is 'Technology and science', and includes articles on everything from drugs to railways, as well as teaching resources.

UCL seminar, 3rd June - 'Shareability and contagion'

Carolyn Burdett will be giving a paper entitled ”Shareability and contagion: psychology and aesthetics at the fin de siecle” at the UCL seminar on Science and Literature at 5.30pm on Tuesday 3rd of June in the Grant Museum of Zoology. Directions can be found here. The paper will be followed by questions and discussion, and the meeting will conclude with a glass of wine at 7:30pm.

“Shareability and contagion: psychology and aesthetics at the fin de siecle”
Over the final three decades of the nineteenth century a growing interest is discernible amongst psychologists in the category of aesthetics. One strand of psychological argument attempted to restate in modern terms the quality of art’s ‘shareability’: emotions elicited by art and literature could be shared, freeing humans from the ‘monopolistic’ nature of much of life’s struggle. At the end of the century, however, shared emotions were also the focus of theories of crowds where feelings are not just shared but caught, contagiously and dangerously. This paper suggests that aesthetic sharing and contagious feeling are both of relevance to an increased pressure being brought to bear by the end of the century on the notion of sympathy – that capacity to share in others’ feelings that composed a core ethical gesture for the Victorians and was central to much of their literary effort. Using the work of the aesthetic theorist, Vernon Lee, it looks beyond the end of the century to Lee’s response to crowd theory and the value of aesthetics during World War 1 and her attempt to re-energise sympathy and replace imitative contagion by the concept of empathy.

Dr Carolyn Burdett is senior lecturer in literature and Victorian studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She was recently awarded a Leverhulme research fellowship to pursue research on her current monograph, Coining Empathy: Psychology, Aesthetics, Ethics, 1870-1920.