Day 1: Using History of Science Archives (Royal Institution of Great Britain).
Day 2: Exploring Science, Literature and Objects (National Maritime Museum).

There will be twenty funded places given to doctoral students for this training event. Bursaries are available for travel/subsistence and accommodation. Applications must be submitted by 1 June 2010 (forms and a provisional programme are available at http://litscimed.org.uk/page/event3). We hope to confirm places by Tuesday 8th June 2010.

Previously unsuccessful applicants to previous events are encouraged you to make an application for this and future events. Potential applicants should note, however, that it is unlikely that MA or non-UK based students will be given places.

Literature, Culture and Science research cluster
AHRC Doctoral Training Programme — ‘Theories and Methods: Literature, Science and Medicine’

Originality in science is synonymous with being first; originality in the arts is somewhat different.  At what point do these two creative endeavours overlap?  Ian McEwan is a novelist who has often taken science as a subject: Enduring Love was about a science writer, Saturday about a brain surgeon.  His latest novel, Solar, is about global warming and its protagonist is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has given up original work to enjoy his own celebrity.  McEwan’s first book, the short stories First Love, Last Rites, was hailed for ‘an originality astonishing for a young man still in his twenties’.  Yet original work by scientists is most often achieved while they are still young: do they develop differently?  Richard Fortey’s original work is on fossils.  He is a research palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum whose books include Trilobite!, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and Earth: an intimate history. A Fellow both of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature, he is a former President of the Geological Society of London.

This event is free for Fellows and Members of the Royal Society of Literature. There are a limited number of tickets available for members of the public at all RSL events. These are sold at the door, from 6pm, on a first-come-first-served basis. We suggest a contribution of £7 (£5 concession). For further information please visit our website http://www.rslit.org, or call us on 02078454676.

Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, Courtauld Institute, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA

This one day workshop, aimed particularly at postgraduates and early career
researchers, introduces and explores historiographical and methodological
issues unique to the history of alchemy and chemistry. We will investigate
the practical challenges of researching chemistry over different periods,
from pre-modern matter theories and artisanal practices, to the shaping of
chemistry as a formal discipline in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and the increasing permeability of chemistry’s boundaries with
other disciplines, including physics and the biosciences, in modern times.
Participation is welcomed both from scholars already working on related
topics, and those interested in exploring points of intersection between
the history of chemistry and their own research.

Discussion will be framed by presentations from junior and established
scholars, including:

• Hasok Chang (University College London), ‘Why has chemistry become
  unfashionable for historians of science?’
• Jennifer Rampling (University of Cambridge), ‘Interpreting alchemy: text,
  image, and practice.’
• Karin Ekholm (Indiana University, Bloomington), ‘Some problems in the
  history of seventeenth-century chemistry.’
• John Perkins (Oxford Brookes University), ‘Searching for chemists in
  eighteenth-century France.’
• Pieter Thyssen (Catholic University of Leuven), ‘The Replication Method in
  the history of chemistry: resolving a nineteenth-century priority dispute.’
• Viviane Quirke (Oxford Brookes University), ‘Chemistry, the pharmaceutical
  industry, and medicine in the twentieth century: drugs as “boundary
  objects.”‘

Lunch is provided. There is no charge for attendance, but registration is
required. Assistance is available towards the cost of travel and
accommodation. Please email Jennifer Rampling for further
details, and to register.

Sponsored by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC).
For more information on SHAC, including details of the Society’s award
scheme for junior scholars, see www.ambix.org.

The workshop immediately follows the BSHS Postgraduate Conference in
Cambridge (5-7 January).

Location: Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, UK

From esoteric arguments over the structure of the universe to highly charged public controversies around the use of stem cells, The Arts Catalyst is bringing together an international line up of artists and scientists to debate today’s hot issues in science and society in the Eye of the Storm on 19 and 20 June.

This two-day conference at Tate Britain will touch on brilliance and ego, obsessions and cover-ups, dissent and whistle-blowing, big science, high finance, deviant science, the reliability of knowledge and the legislation of uncertainty. Eye of the Storm develops Tate’s mission to present new research and debates within visual culture into the area of contemporary interrelationships between art, science and society.

See the conference website for registration and programme details.

Modern disciplines like geology, history, and anthropology often trace their origins to Romantic-era developments. “Literature,” as a distinct category of expressive writing also emerged in conjunction with other disciplines, a synthetic dialogue that would later be characterized as a contentious division between “two cultures.” So too do sites such as the gallery, the museum, and the academy emerge around this time as new forms of sociability, as attempts to display unruly arrays of pictures and other eccentric specimens.

What can Romantic-era aesthetic practices contribute to our understandings of the rise of disciplinarity in the nineteenth century? How can the increasing professionalization and isolation of practices like botany, literary criticism, geology, art and theatre reviews, and collecting illuminate the unruly dynamism of aesthetic forms, both verbal and visual? How do the spaces (whether institutional, geographic, or social) of predisciplinary encounters and formations help shape disciplinary discourses, and how do subjects with varying degrees of agency participate in these discourses? Reading against the grain of the “rise of disciplinarity”, and trying to undo its teleological short circuits, this conference seeks to engage imaginatively with the possibilities of predisciplinarity.

For information on registration visit the conference Website or write to Jon Millington

Conference Venue: Roberts Building, UCL, Malet Place, Torrington Place, London, WC1E 7JE (opposite the Gower St Waterstones)

Conference Committee: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck), Adriana Craciun (University of California, Riverside), Luciana Martins (Birkbeck).

University of East Anglia, UK

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Randall Stevenson (University of Edinburgh) and Dr
Bryony Randall (University of Glasgow)

At the turn of the twentieth century developments in the sciences and
technology seemed to necessitate a radical review of the nature, perhaps
even the existence, of time. This interdisciplinary conference will look
at ways in which key figures from this period conceptualised and
represented these changes, and at how this period has been represented
since. Papers will range from the history of science to philosophy and
literature. Further details on the conference website.

Abstracts of 300-400 words should be sent to Kate Armond or Simon de Bourcier by Wednesday June 3rd 2009.

8 May 2009 at Research Institute for the Humanities, Keele University

“As little more than an infant, he was walking through a graveyard with his sister, Mary, ten years his senior, and reading the epitaphs on the universally belauded dead — for he was a precocious reader, who, it is said, ’knew his letters before he could talk’. As he came away, he turned to his sister and asked: ’Mary, where are the naughty people buried?’ This, we may be sure, though a joke to the reader, was not uttered as a joke by the small child” — Robert Lynd on Charles Lamb

For the biennial BARS Early Careers and Postgraduate Conference for 2009 we invite papers on lives and afterlives in the Romantic period. In particular, we are interested in biography and biographical criticism, including the receptions and depictions of both major and minor writers and artists who lived between c.1770 and 1835. We are also interested in multidisciplinary conversations about the pedagogical issues associated with our theme, as well as reflections on archival and methodological problems and solutions. We will have a roundtable discussion on Teaching Romanticism, chaired by Professor Sharon Ruston, as well as a roundtable panel on Archival Research, a Q&A session on Academic Publishing, and a Keynote address by Professor David Amigoni.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• The production and reception of Collected Works
• Biographies, book history & periodical culture
• The Death of the Author: biographical criticism after Theory
• Biographical dictionaries & anecdotes
• “Biofictions” (e.g. Peter Ackroyd’s Blake)
• Literature: Life: Science
• Reception histories of major/minor authors
• Biographies and the new media
• Genius & Celebrity
• Biographies after Johnson and Boswell
• Classical precedents
• Morality, censorship and life writing
• Lives and visual art / Lives on stage
• Published and unpublished letters
• Autobiographical writing & memoirs
• Epitaphs & tourist industries

Each paper will last 20 minutes. Please send abstracts of around 200 words to Dr. Daniel Cook. We especially welcome panel proposals. In this instance send us a panel title, a list of three or four speakers and a chair (if appropriate), titles of the papers, and abstracts.

Deadline for abstracts: 19th March 2009

Organisers: Dr. Daniel Cook (Keele), Amber Kay Regis (Keele) & Matthew Sangster (Royal Holloway)

Read Laura Daniels review on the BSLS site.