Themed Issue Now Available: Victorian Science and Visual Culture
The latest special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture is now available online on the topic of ‘Victorian Science and Visual Culture’. This new issue contains the following articles:

Victorian science and popular visual culture FREE ACCESS
Bernard Lightman

Virtual reality and subjective responses: Narrating the search for the Franklin expedition through Robert Burford’s panorama
Laurie Garrison

Peopling the landscape: Showmen, displayed peoples and travel illustration in nineteenth-century Britain
Sadiah Qureshi

Illuminating illusions, or, the Victorian art of seeing things
Iwan Rhys Morus

The secret life of plants: Visualizing vegetative movement, 1880–1903
Oliver Gaycken

Transport phenomena: Space and visibility in Victorian physics
Simon Schaffer

Book Reviews, including

Victorian Glassworlds: Glass culture and the imagination 1830-1880
John Plunkett

Performing illusions: cinema, special effects and the virtual actor
Stephen Bottomore

Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910: vernacular modernity in France
Stephen Bottomore

9:30-17:00, 25 April 2012

Many people look suspiciously at science in fictional media and may ask themselves: Why don’t the creators of fiction ever talk to real scientists? In fact, those who write novels, craft television scripts, create movies, and produce stage plays do speak with scientists on a regular basis. This workshop explores how science provides challenges and opportunities for the creators of fiction. By bringing together leading entertainment professionals, novelists, arts scholars, and scientists the workshop will forge new relationships between the scientific community and the arts/entertainment community. One goal of the workshop is to begin discussions about creating a “Science and Entertainment” collaboration programme in the UK equivalent to the Science and Entertainment Exchange run by the National Academy of Sciences in the US.

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers or for panels on any aspect of the relationship between literature and mathematics in Europe during the long nineteenth century.  Proposals and papers should be in English.

 Keynote speakers:

 Professor Daniel Brown (University of Western Australia).

Professor Marilyn Gaull (The Editorial Institute, Boston University)

Professor Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow)

 How did nineteenth-century British and European literary writers and readers interact with mathematics, both advanced and basic?  How were mathematical ideas transformed into narrative or poetry, satirised, domesticated, played with, adapted for religious and political use?  What would be the consequences for nineteenth-century studies of better knowledge and understanding of the period’s mathematical culture? 

 Mary Poovey wrote in her History of the Modern Fact that for the literary critic, ‘numbers constitute something like the last frontier of representation’.  This conference invites nineteenth-centuryists to explore ways of crossing that frontier. 

 Topics may include:

 Metrics and measure in poetry and mathematics

Form, geometry and space in literature and mathematics

Literature and mathematics in education

Demonstration vs ‘moral evidence’

Mathematical life-writing

Mathematics as language

Sacred and profane mathematics

Mathematical narratives

Towards a methodology of literature and mathematics studies

Mathematical models of nineteenth-century writing and reading

 Proposals and enquiries should be sent to Alice Jenkins: alice.jenkins@glasgow.ac.uk by 7 February 2011.  Acceptances will be mailed out by 17 February and the draft programme will be published shortly afterwards.  

 This event is funded by the European Research Council and supported by ArtsLab at the University of Glasgow.

What tensions exist between the book in art and the book in science?  What collaborations emerge? How do these tensions or collaborations differ according to time or place? What roles have material forms-manuscript, print or digital embodiments or books, periodicals, journals, editions-played in the histories of artistic and scientific works? How does the lens of art or science inform histories of reading and readers? What does this lens reveal about histories of authorship?  How have commercial factors or economics influenced the production or distribution of scientific or artistic works? What roles have states or institutions played in the history of the book in art and science?

International Interdisciplinary Conference, 17-18 February 2011

Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease, Durham University, UK

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 July 2010

This conference will discuss the history of the relationship between aesthetics and medical understandings of the body. Today’s vogue for neurological accounts of artistic emotions has a long pedigree. Since G.S. Rousseau’s pioneering work underlined the importance of models of the nervous system in eighteenth-century aesthetics, the examination of physiological explanations in aesthetics has become a highly productive field of interdisciplinary research. Drawing on this background, the conference aims to illuminate the influence that different medical models of physiology and the nervous system have had on theories of aesthetic experience. How have aesthetic concepts (for instance, imagination or genius) be grounded medically? What effect did the shift from animal spirits to modern neurophysiology have on aesthetics?

This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars working in a wide range of fields, including not only the history of medicine but also in subjects such as art history, languages and musicology.

The medical effects of culture were not always regarded as positive. The second focus of the conference will be the supposed ability of excessive reading, music and so on to ‘over-stimulate’ nerves and cause nervousness, mental and physical illness, homosexuality and even death.

It will consider questions regarding the effects of various theories of neuropathology and psychopathology on the concept of pathological culture. What kinds of culture could lead to such over-stimulation? How was this medical critique of culture related to moral objections and changes in gender relations, politics and society? How was it linked to medical concern about lack of attention and willpower?

Abstracts for 20-minute papers (maximum 250 words) should be submitted electronically to the organisers by 31 July 2010 at the following address: James.kennaway@durham.ac.uk.

The PhD-Net “Internationalisation of Literature and Science since the Early Modern Period” is a bi-national PhD programme run collaboratively by King’s College London and the University of Stuttgart, which aims to forge interdisciplinary connections between various subjects in the Humanities (German Studies, English Studies, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and the Histories of Medicine, Science and Technology). Partner institutions in Germany include the German Literature Archive in Marbach and the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation.

An international research group will support and connect projects which address both inter- and trans-national tendencies within the Humanities. Projects will develop both theoretical models for the as yet under-researched area of internationalisation within the Humanities, as well as critically assess historical case studies from the early modern period onwards, which address the role of exchange movements and networks and the transfer of topics, practices and methods in literature and science. Of particular interest is the relevance of literature(s) for the internationalisation of the sciences, alongside critical reflections on the significance of the presentation and the mediality of knowledge (language, text, image) for its circulation, communication and implementation.

For further info, including application procedure, please click here or contact Ben Schofield (benedict.schofield@kcl.ac.uk).

The symposium will be held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), and is funded by the European Research Council. Anyone interested in Victorian literature and science, education, or mathematics are very welcome to attend. The regular fee is £20; a reduced rate is available. Please contact the conference organiser, a.jenkins_at_englit.arts.gla.ac.uk, if you would like to attend.

In the twenty-first century, environmentalism and the impacts of climate change form a nexus of intense debates about relationship between human culture and the natural world. However, the centrality of the natural world to the nineteenth century imagination has long been acknowledged by scholars, way-marked by Lynn Merrill’s The Romance of Victorian Natural History (1989) for example, while Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002) demonstrates the relevance of nineteenth-century research to the modern world.

This conference probes the significance of nature to the long nineteenth century and to our study of its literature, history, science, art, and other media. How did the natural world influence people in the nineteenth century?and how did nineteenth-century culture shape attitudes to the natural world? Have twenty-first century questions over nature, climate, and the environment changed the way we view and study the cultural products of the nineteenth century, or offered new avenues for research, especially interdisciplinary research?

Possible topics could include but are not limited to:
Representations of nature in history, literature, drama, poetry, art, theatre Representations of, or human relationships with: oceans and the seaside, mountains and the countryside, rivers, lakes, gardens, working animals, pets Natural history, specimens, collecting, displaying Science and human or animal nature: hybridity, husbandry, eugenics; Darwinism and biology; Lyell and geology Climate change, environmentalism, eco-criticism, the ecotopia The natural world in romance, Gothic, the fantastic Natural horror, biological monstrosity and the limits of the human The (un)natural city, machine, media The (super)natural world: ghosts, spiritualism, Gothic Theoretical approaches to human and animal nature or the representation of nature.

Postgraduate and early-career researchers are invited to submit 300 word proposals for 20 minute papers or proposals for panels to natureconference@ed.ac.uk by 16 November 2009. .

Organisers: Claire McKechnie, University of Edinburgh and Dr Emily Alder, Edinburgh Napier University. Contact us at natureconference@ed.ac.uk.

We are grateful for the support of the British Association for Victorian Studies, the British Society for Literature and Science, and the Centre for Literature and Writing at Edinburgh Napier University.