"A History of the Small" One-Day Conference

Saturday 23 February 2019

10.30 am - 5.00 pm

St Cross College, University of Oxford - Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, Department of Physics 

Throughout the ages physics has sought to explain the nature of matter both on Earth and in the heavens. Millennia ago, the Greek philosophers posited the existence of atoms, thereby launching a journey through the centuries, which in due course confirmed their existence and have made them tools of our everyday life. More recently, modern thought combined the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics leading to an understanding of matter now encoded in the Standard Model. This progress has led to startling new applications in fields such as nanotechnology and genomics. This conference will trace the progress of thought from the speculations of the ancients to the reality of the modern day. Registration to attend this conference is free, but must be confirmed using the Conference booking form by midday on Friday 15 February 2019.

The programme for the day is below:

MORNING CHAIR: Dr Nicoleta Gaciu (Oxford Brookes University) 

10.30 am WELCOME 

10.40 am Professor Peter Atkins (University of Oxford) - The Evolution of the Atom 

11.30 am Professor Michelle Peckham (University of Leeds) - What is a Microscope? How the Microscope has Evolved over 350 Years 

12.20 pm Professor Sean Freeman (University of Manchester)- Searching for Atomic Constituents: Splitting the Atom? 

1.15 pm LUNCH BREAK AFTERNOON CHAIR: Dr Shirley Northover (The Open University) 2.15 pm Dr Rolf Landua (CERN, Geneva) - A Short History of the Smallest 

3.05 pm Professor Jeremy Baumberg FRS (University of Cambridge) - The Emergence of Nanoscience 

4 pm TEA/COFFEE BREAK 

4.30 pm SUMMARY OF THE DAY'S PROCEEDINGS - Professor Alfons Weber (University of Oxford/Rutherford Appleton Laboratory)

There will be a conference dinner at St Cross in the evening following the end of the conference with an after-dinner talk by Jonty Hurwitz (nano sculptor and engineer) on his construction of the smallest human form ever created using nanotechnology. Although the conference itself is free of charge, the dinner carries a cost of £35 to attend - a place for dinner (only for confirmed conference attendees and their guests) can be booked until the deadline of midday on Friday 15 February 2019. This event is sponsored by the Faculty of History, University of Oxford and by a grant-in-aid from the Center for History of Physics, American Institute of Physics.

Further information here.

ADC - End of the Line

London, 1969. A conscientious but mischievous phone-operator uses her specialist skills to avert the end of the network.

The last days of the manual telephone exchange. While the new automated switchboards are being installed across the nation, an operator resents connecting phone calls that are ending the careers of her colleagues. Never shy to a prank, Susan commits herself to take it further, using her skills of eavesdropping, rumour-spreading, and call-misdirection to save the present from the future. When the upgrades were only scheduled in Birmingham alone she was able divert and disrupt them; yet within days the threat starts to close in on London itself.

Unable to match the efficiency of the system, Susan must contend for the human side of the technological sector. Though she is up against an industry that prefers the superfast dreams of the visionaries, who promise instant connectivity and the removal of human error. Susan refuses to leave, in part to complete her employment, and in part to wait for the impossible return of a precious fellow operator.

Further details and ticket booking here.

CFP - Interdisciplinarity: The New Discipline?

School of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Glasgow, Crichton Campus, Dumfries, DG1 4ZL

Tuesday 3rd September - Thursday 5th September 2019

Conference Description

The School of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Glasgow, will mark 20 years of the University of Glasgow's presence at its Dumfries campus with a conference examining interdisciplinarity, its evolving interpretations, histories and uses. Amongst the key themes the conference will consider is the normalisation of interdisciplinarity methods, perspectives and discourses within research and educational contexts. Participants will address the drivers, challenges and opportunities of integrating approaches from different disciplines offered by funding bodies, academic journals and REF panels. Practitioners from teaching and learning are invited to address the processes by which the difficulties and benefits of teaching mixed disciplinary groups, with their own distinctive discourses and regimes of truth, have been negotiated, embraced and/or abandoned.

As well as keynote and plenary sessions, the conference will also have break-out sessions based on examining interdisciplinarity within discipline-specific, specialist and/or niche research and teaching groups. Each of these will feed back via a convenor at a roundtable event during the conference to explore questions to explore what changes have occurred and to what extent has the discourse of interdisciplinarity provided not new approaches to intellectual discovery but a cover for the continuation of existing disciplinary methods.

The types of key points we hope the participants on the specialist sessions will address and the co-ordinator will feedback on are:

• What do you mean by 'interdisciplinarity', how far does it differ or concur with interpretations within your discipline/subject area and how is it manifested? 
• What do different parties view as the strengths and weaknesses of interdisciplinarity as it is practised in your research or in relation to pedagogical approaches and teaching methods? 
• To what extent is interdisciplinarity occurring and how do the demands of attracting funding, achieving publication, meeting REF, managerial and institutional demands shape the forms of interdisciplinarity? 
• How are external pressures shaping interdisciplinarity resisted or transcended? 
• What other factors shape the promotion, marginalisation, configuring and normalisation of interdisciplinarity? 
• How, if at all, has 'interdisciplinarity' changed your discipline/subject area in general and your practice in particular? 
• What might others from outside your discipline/subject area learn from your experience of interdisciplinarity?

Please submit abstracts of 200 words (maximum) proposing paper, presentation or poster by Thursday 4th April 2019 to either: Dr Sandy Whitelaw or Dr Benjamin Franks.

Talk - Fantasy and the Anthropocene

Prof Brian Attebery, University of Glasgow

Thursday 24 January 2019, 16:00-18:00

Mary Allan Building room 104, Homerton College, Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ


The concept of the Anthropocene says that humans are primarily responsible for the current state of the world, and only we (if anyone) can fix it. In this talk, Brian Attebery will explore traditional narrative patterns and their repurposing by fantasy writers from J. R. R. Tolkien to N. K. Jemisin. Such patterns take on new purpose and significance in the context of species die-offs, climate change, and other human-caused alterations of the environment. Examples range from the killing of the forest guardian in the epic of Gilgamesh to John Crowley’s recent novel Ka.

Brian Attebery is the author of Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth and Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, among other genre studies. His work has been honored with a Pilgrim Award, two Mythopoeic Awards, and the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. He is a Professor of English at Idaho State University and editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He is currently working on a new edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home for the Library of America and as of January, 2019, is Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow.

Representing the Medical Body: 28 March 2019, Science Museum, London

A one-day workshop at the Science Museum, London, organised by Katy Barrett (Curator of Art Collections) and Sarah Wade (Research Manager)

In 2019, a series of five landmark new medicine galleries will open at the Science Museum in London. A series of contemporary art commissions form a significant part of this project along with images of the human body throughout the history of art. This provides an ideal opportunity to reflect on the unique ways in which the body has been represented in relation to health and medicine through the history of art and visual culture.

This one-day interdisciplinary workshop will bring together artists, scientists and historians of art, science and medicine to explore artistic responses to medicine and representations of the medical body throughout history. Papers are invited from a range of critical frameworks including, feminist, queer, postcolonialist, posthuman and gender studies. Contributions can take a variety of forms including papers, artist's talks, films and performances. The day will end with a response from Professor Ludmilla Jordanova, Department of History, Durham University.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers. Topics might include:

• Medical models and anatomy
• Death and dying
• Medical portraiture
• Representations of disability, disease and healing
• Photography and ethnography or anthropology
• Contemporary or historical medical imaging
• The role of imagery in diagnosis

Please send a 250-word abstract and a short bio of no more than a paragraph to sarah.wade@sciencemuseum.ac.uk by the end of Sunday 20^th January 2019.

JOB - BOOKSELLER AND CATALOGUER – SCIENCE SPECIALIST

Location: Chelsea, London Salary: £25-35,000 p.a. dependent on experience plus benefits
Duration: Permanent
Hours: Full time 5 days per week to include alternate Saturdays

Peter Harrington Limited, an established antiquarian bookseller with a global presence, are seeking to appoint a cataloguer with strong scientific knowledge and interest.

JOB SPECIFICATION

Main duties and responsibilities include:
• research and cataloguing of material related to science, from antiquity to modernity
• sourcing, buying and selling stock of scientific interest
• cataloguing, buying and selling stock items of a more general natur
• representing the business at trade fairs in the UK and overseas
• maintaining current specialist knowledge of the global book trade including sources of supply, e.g. auctions, booksellers, third party websites and private individuals
• working flexibly as required to accommodate staff shortages during trade fairs and seasonal/exceptional extended opening hours

PERSON SPECIFICATION

Skills, qualifications and experience include:
 • strong interest in, and knowledge of, the history of science (essential)
• good knowledge of rare/antiquarian books and the rare book trade (desirable)
• demonstrable knowledge and experience in purchasing and selling rare books (desirable)
• a high degree of IT literacy including databases, Microsoft Office and the internet (essential)
• strong research skills (essential)
• excellent spoken and written English and excellent numeracy (essential)
• excellent interpersonal and communication skills (essential)
• the ability and confidence to deal with a wide range of people (essential)
• be free, willing, and able to travel abroad on a regular basis, both as part of a team or alone, as the company’s representative (essential)
• good team working (essential)
• the ability to work under pressure (essential)
• commercial awareness (desirable)

Applicants should request an application form from Sam Caethoven at sam@peterharrington.co.uk or 020 7591 0220

Narrative Science public seminar series

For the abstracts, and details as to the time and location, please check the website: 

15th January 2019:
Sharon Crasnow (Norco College)- 'Counterfactual Narrative in Political Science'
Phyllis Kirstin Illari (UCL)- TBA

29th January 2019:
Ivan Flis (University of Utrecht)- 'Narrating an unfinished science: Scientific psychology in late-twentieth century textbooks'
Adrian Currie (University of Exeter)- 'History is Peculiar​'

12th February 2019:
Alfred Nordmann (Technical University Darmstadt)- 'A Feeling for the Mechanism'
Eleonora Loiodice (Università degli Studi di Bari)- 'Science as a creation: Giorgio de Santillana’s approach to history of science'

26th February 2019:
Annamaria Contini (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)- 'Metaphor as narrative reconfiguration: an example in the French physiology of the late nineteenth century'
Adelene Buckland (King's College London)- 'Plot Problems: Geological Narratives, Anti-Narratives, and Counter-Narratives in the Early Nineteenth Century'

 12th March 2019:
Sarah Dillon (University of Cambridge)- 'Reasoning by Analogy: ELIZA, Pygmalion and the Societal Harm of Gendering Virtual Personal Assistants'
Vito De Lucia (The Arctic University of Norway)- 'Reading law outside of the legal text: legal narratives'

26th March 2019:
Marco Tamborini (Technical University Darmstadt)- 'Narrating the Deep Past'
Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter)- 'From Travel Diary to Species Catalogue: How Linnaeus Came to See Lapland'

 

Exhibition in the Library of Christ's College: "The Secrets of Life: Scientists, Mathematicians, and the Hunt for Answers".

The exhibition is curated by Senior Library Assistant Katherine Krick-Pridgeon, and examines work in life sciences, biochemistry, physics, and mathematics from the fifteenth century to the present. Among many other items, the exhibition includes books by Copernicus, Galileo and Margaret Cavendish, the earliest plant specimens collected by Charles Darwin, and recent molecular models and laboratory noteboooks. The exhibition is open to the public until 25 April 2019 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00pm to 4:00pm, during Michaelmas and Lent terms. For further details see here.

Call for submissions - A History of Science Sourcebook

REMINDER: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS (deadline January 10th 2019)

We are asking for: Sources and explanatory text for a history of science sourcebook that focuses on women in science (broadly construed) from a global perspective, from antiquity to the present day.

Aims: Our sourcebook is designed to complement the teaching of undergraduate history of science courses, by providing sources that reveal women’s involvement in knowledge production from around the world. Our ambition is to contribute to liberating the curriculum within the history of science, by giving voice to underrepresented actors, and by providing sources that go beyond traditional textual accounts, alongside brief explanatory notes.

Details: Possible sources might include letters, instruments, weapons, artwork, poetry, textiles, recipes, diary entries, and scrapbooks amongst many others. We particularly welcome new translations and transcriptions. We welcome submissions under, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Materials of Science
• Objects and alternative sources 
• Media, Art, Images, Sculpture 
• Exploration 
• Maritime, space exploration 
• Empire and exoticism 
• Map making, travel accounts 
• Non-western knowledge making 
• Non-traditional disciplines and methods 
• Non-western ideologies and cosmologies 
• Alternative measuring devices or instruments 
• Medicine Disease and healing 
• The body, embodied experience 
• Food, recipes, and care 
• Religion 
• Knowledge and belief 
• Ritual and medicine 
• Conflicts and cooperation 
• Science & Violence 
• War 
• Colonialism and oppressive practices
• Crime 
• Spaces and Communities 
• Domestic and professional spaces, institutions 
• Networks, access and agency 
• Rebels, dissenters, outsiders 
• Popular science and consuming knowledge 
• Indigenous & Folk knowledge 
• Marginalised practices and erasure 
• Access & agency 
• Technology 
• Instruments 
• Skill and Artisanry 
• Embodied and/or tacit knowledges 
• Plants and Animals Botany and uses of flora 
• Agriculture 
• Natural history and collecting

How to submit: Please send us the source you would like to use (low res. image or text sources not exceeding 5,000 words), details of the copyright owners of the source, and a covering letter of no more than 200 words. Covering letters should give some background to the source and why you believe it is relevant to this work, as well as a little detail of your own background. A CV may be attached if you wish. Email submissions to historyofsciencesourcebook@yahoo.com by 10th January 2019. Final contributions to the book will be due in May 2019 and consist of no more than 1000 words of explanatory text aimed at introducing each corresponding source to undergraduate students.

An example of a final submission can be found on our website

Please note that all sources must be able to be published in Open Access (Creative Commons) format and that each author will need to acquire copyright permissions to publish their source.

e strongly encourage proposals from early career researchers and people from underrepresented communities. We are also more than happy to consider multiple sources from one applicant.