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Essays should be currently unpublished and not under consideration by another journal.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.

Video - Charlotte Sleigh on Literature and Science

A recording of a talk by Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent), on 'Engineering fiction: literature and science in interwar Britain' from the Oxford Literature and Science Research Seminar Series, 20/03/2015, is available here.

Science and Literature - Summer School

INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION ON SCIENCE AND LITERATURE

DIVISION of HISTORY of SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY

INTERNATIONAL UNION for the HISTORY and PHILOSOPHY of SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY

 

INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL ON SCIENCE AND LITERATURE

 

Following the successful 1st International Conference on Science and Literature, that took place in Athens last year, the International Commission on Science and Literature is happy to announce the  Summer School on Science and Literature, which will be held in the Greek island of Andros, from the 22nd to the 26th of June 2015.

The Summer School will be of especial interest to graduate students and early-career researchers working on literature, the sciences and the history of science. It will offer the opportunity for an in-depth presentation and discussion of themes relevant to Science and Literature at large. Each day, a lecture will be given on a specific point of intersection between science and literature. Participants will then work in small groups and prepare their own views on the subject, and discuss how it pertains to their own research. Participants will also have the opportunity to present short papers on their research or on subjects they want to discuss and receive feedback on. Finally, a round table will be organized discussing the future of Science and Literature as an academic field and its possible application in scientific and literary education.  The language of the Summer School will be English but there will be an opportunity for presentations in French, German and Greek if there is a relevant interest.

 

Dr. John Holmes, Chair of the British Society for Literature and Science, Prof. Manuela Rossini, President of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (Europe), Prof. Paola Spinozzi, University of Ferrara, Prof. Constantin Canavas, Hamburg Technical University have already confirmed their participation as invited speakers.

Andros island is a picturesque island on the Aegean Sea, about two hours from Attica (Rafina harbor), with several ferries during the day. There is a also a convenient connection between Athens airport and Rafina harbor.

 

For an overview of Andros island visit http://www.andros.gr/ind_en.htm

The venue of the summer school will be Pighi Sariza Hotel (http://www.pighisarizahotel.gr/index_en.html), with several nice beaches a short distance from the hotel. Participants will have also the chance to participate in several cultural events including visits to the famous Goulandri Museum of Modern Art and the Kaireios Library in Chora, the capital of Andros. The cost of the accommodation will be around 50 euros per day (breakfast, lunch and dinner included). There will also be a registration fee of 140 Euros. Support for a number of young scholars will be provided by a DHST/IUHPST grant.

 

Those who are interested to participate are invited to send an email to gvlahakis@yahoo.com and/or konstantinos.tampakis@gmail.com by May 20, 2015.

CFP - The Darwins Reconsidered

Evolution, Writing & Inheritance in the Works of Erasmus and Charles Darwin
A One-Day Colloquium: Friday, September 4, 2015
University of Roehampton, London.

Keynote Speakers: Professor David Amigoni (Keele University) Professor Tim Fulford (De Montfort University)

Plenary Speaker: Dr John Holmes (Reading University)

When the 28-year-old Charles Darwin first opened his ‘evolutionary’ notebook in 1837, he deployed the title of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s medical treatise, Zoonomia (1794-6). By then, Erasmus -- poet, doctor, inventor and leading light of the Birmingham Lunar Society -- had drifted into comparative obscurity; best remembered as the eccentric genius whose work The Loves of Plants (1789) had been notoriously parodied as The Loves of Triangles. Erasmus was never forgotten by his more famous grandson, however, and throughout Charles’s career, Erasmus’s writing and thinking acted as both catalyst and antagonist to Charles’s burgeoning evolutionary ideas, on such subjects as heredity, variation and sexual selection. Forty-two years later, Erasmus was also the subject of Charles’s own venture into non-scientific writing – a biography of his illustrious grandfather. In the first academic conference to formally consider the imaginative and scientific relationship between these two remarkable speculative thinkers, we ask, in what ways did Erasmus’s life and works facilitate and anticipate Charles’s ideas, and how did Charles mobilise the stated and unstated affinities with Erasmus to enrich his own thinking?

We invite papers of 20 minutes that consider the two writers in the following broad subject areas:

• poetry, aesthetics, and writing style
• scientific families & heredity 
• evolution
• styles of observation 
• humour and excess 
• pleasure 
• biography 
• the relation between the arts and sciences 
• the natural world 
• variation and diversification 
• geology 
• family life 
• experimentation 
• scientific method 
• public and private sphere

 Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a short biography, to the conference organisers, Prof. Martin Priestman (M.Priestman@roehampton.ac.uk) & Dr Louise Lee (Louise.Lee@roehampton.ac.uk) by April 28, 2015.

Recap - Blinded by the Sun

Characters from the play 'live-sketched' by Simon during Adrian's introduction.

At our second - and last - meeting of term we discussed Stephen Poliakoff's Blinded by the Sun (1996). After dishing out the cake and drinks (not quite the picnic fare represented in the play...), Adrian provided an excellent and thorough introduction to Poliakoff, his work, and even his family.

Alongside Arcadia (1993) and Copenhagen (1998), Blinded by the Sun formed, we learned, the middle of a trio of science plays produced by the National in the 'nineties. Arguably the least well known of these plays, it is also the only one in which, as its opening instructions say, 'The time is the present' throughout. Is this best, therefore, seen as an 'unhappy state of the nation' play?

Adrian identified the key themes of the play's attempt to gain insight into the workings of academia and its relationship with wider society: how, it asks, do science departments response to the world? What does the world want from them, and what do they want from the world? What does the world reward in the sciences and what does it not reward? What do science departments themselves value and/or reward? With Poliakoff's brother a chemistry professor at Nottingham, we felt the playwright had a particular connection to these topics. Scrutiny of the current website of the Nottingham chemistry department shows its quite evident placement in relation to wider audiences, with emphases on student satisfaction and sustainable chemistry ('benign by design').

Guided by Adrian, we also thought about replication and reputations in science, with reference to the cold fusion controversy of the late nineteen-eighties. Does, as the play seem to suggest, a focus on sensational frauds miss many other forms of misconduct or betraying of ideals as part of scientific practice? At several points in the play we felt its characters expressed well the frustrations, insights, and experience of actually conducting scientific research; the different personalities involved seemed to stand in for different types (and generations) of researchers.

The discussion continued to cover everything from perpetual motion machines to detergent. In particular, we talked about several pairs of topics: pure and applied science, individual and group research, gender and careers, counterfeiting and skill, cognitive dissonance and fraud, inspiration and perspiration. A fitting conclusion to our term focussing on this pair of plays.

Talk - ‘Science Communication’

A talk by Dr Charlotte Sleigh, Reader in History of Science at the University of Kent, will be followed by a conversation between Dr Sleigh and Tilly Blyth, curator of the recently-opened gallery, ‘Information Age’.

Tuesday 31 March, 1 pm In the Patrons’ Room of the Smith Centre, at the Science Museum

The entrance to the Smith Centre is from Imperial College Road. Go north from the Museum entrance (i.e. to the right when facing the Museum), turn the corner on the left, and ring the bell at the entrance to the Smith Centre of the left. Please feel free to bring a lunch to eat, if you wish.

Everyone is welcome.