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So that readers of the BSLS website can readily trace the authors of BSLS book reviews, I have set up a new index of book reviews ordered by reviewer, to complement the existing indexes by author and date. You can find this index in the main menu down the side of this page, or by going to the reviews page itself.
John Holmes, Reviews Editor
George Levine, winner of the BSLS book prize for 2008, has written a review essay on Brian Boyd’s much discussed new book On the Origin of Stories, which was shortlisted for the BSLS book prize for 2009. To read his essay, click here.
‘Such Total and Prodigious Alteration’ / ‘The Wounds May Be Again Bound Up’:
Readings and Representations of the Seventeenth Century
An academic conference to be held in Chetham’s Library, Manchester, 28th-29th January, 2011
During the restoration and eighteenth century, the civil war period was consistently represented as a traumatic break in the history of England and the British Isles, separating the institutionally and culturally modern Augustans from either the primitiveness or idealised simplicity of the earlier epoch. Today, much academic practice silently repeats the period’s self-representation as a century divided between pre and post civil war cultures, whether in research, job descriptions or in undergraduate survey courses. Among the effects of this division of labour is a tendency for the earlier ‘Renaissance’ decades to be privileged over the restoration, which is frequently treated as a poor relation to the eighteenth century.
This conference provides a forum for researchers in all disciplines whose work spans all or any part of the long seventeenth century. As our titular quotations from Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Swift’s sermon ‘On the Martyrdom of King Charles I’ suggest, we also encourage papers on subsequent imaginings of the period that have contributed to or contested the ways in which it is read today.
Concerns include but are not limited to:
Please send abstracts of 300-500 words to James Smith (Manchester) and Joel Swann (Keele) by 15th October 2010: c17.conference@manchester.ac.uk. Further information:
http://www.chethams.org.uk/c17conference.html. Proposals from postgraduate students are particularly welcome and student attendance will be subsidised by the generous support of the Society for Renaissance Studies.
Professor Dame Gillian Beer, “Darwin and the Descent of Woman”
Respondent: Professor Juliet Mitchell
Chair: Professor Jim Secord
Weds 2 June 2010, 5.00pm to 6.30pm
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge
All Welcome: Free Entrance and a glass of wine
Sponsored by the Centre for Gender Studies and the Darwin Correspondence Project
I understand that there are still slots for papers at this conference, even though the deadline has just expired:
‘Literature and Science’ The 4th annual conference of The Australasian Association for Literature
University of NSW Monday July 5-Tuesday July 6, 2010
Keynote Speakers:
Brian Boyd (University of Auckland)
Claire Colebrook (Penn State University)
Paul Giles (University of Sydney)
As we prepare to enter the second decade of the 21st Century, it is increasingly apparent that science and literature no longer represent rival or mutually exclusive domains of knowledge. Indeed, literature has long been in dialogue with science, and science is currently offering literary critics rich and productive ways of re-conceiving literature. Cognitive science and evolutionary theory are two scientific fields that are helping reshape our understanding of the literary object. Equally, literary critics are becoming progressively more interested in understanding how scientific discourse utilizes distinctly literary thinking and technique. We therefore welcome papers on any aspect of the intersection of literature and science. Proposed topics might address:
The literary works discussed might be drawn from any period and from any language (though all papers will need to be presented in English).
Proposals should be 250-300 words in length and sent by 30 April 2010 via the submission form on the webpage: http://www.aal.asn.au/conference/2010/call-for-papers/index.shtml
The BSLS book prize for the best book in the field of literature and science published in 2009 has been awarded to Leah Knight for Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (Ashgate).
The following books have been shortlisted for the British Society for Literature and Science prize for the best book in the field of literature and science published in 2009:
Reviews of a number of these books are currently available on the reviews pages of this website. The prize itself will be announced at the BSLS conference in April.
Call for papers
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews “ Poetries and sciences in the 21st Century”
This is to invite proposals for contributions to a themed issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews on the topic of “Poetries and sciences in the 21st Century”, to be published as volume 37, number 2, June 2012.
The British Society for Literature and Science is pleased to invite nominations for the annual BSLS Book Prize. The prize of £150 will be awarded to the best book published in English in 2009 in the field of literature and science. Monographs, edited volumes, editions and books of creative writing are all eligible for consideration, excepting books wholly or partly written by members of the BSLS executive.
Please send nominations, giving the author, title and publisher, to Dr John Holmes (book-prize convenor) at j.r.holmes@reading.ac.uk, with ‘BSLS Book Prize’ as the subject heading. The deadline for receipt of nominations is 16 January 2009.
* The book prize was launched in 2007. The past winners are Ralph O’Connor for The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and George Levine for Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
* Nominations are invited from BSLS members and from publishers. The authors or editors of the nominated books need not be BSLS members. BSLS members are welcome to nominate their own books.
* The book must have 2009 as its publication date.
* The winner of this year’s prize will be announced at the fifth annual conference of the BSLS in April 2010 at Northumbria University.
* The prize will be paid by means of a cheque made out in pounds sterling.
On Wednesday 8th July at 2 p.m. at the Cambridge Darwin Festival, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and John Holmes will be interviewing a number of contemporary writers about the impact of Darwin and his ideas on their work. Speakers will include the playwrights Craig Baxter and Peter Parnell and the poets Ruth Padel, John Barnie and Kelley Swain. For details of the event and how to register, go to
Rebecca Stott
Darwin in the Literary World – one of six of the annual Cambridge Darwin Lecture Series
Lady Mitchell Hall, West Road, at 5.30-6.30 on Friday 6th Feb
Within months of Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species, novelists, poets and artists began to turn Darwin’s ideas into art. That they have continued to do so up to the present day is a testimony to the imaginative reach of Darwin’s ideas as well as to the extent to which they transformed ways of seeing. Darwinism can be seen running through some of the late nineteenth century’s most richly imaginative prose and poetry including Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr Moreau and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But where nineteenth-century writers may have seen hybrid monsters, degeneration and extinction, Darwinism has come to have new meanings for each subsequent generation of writers and artists. Novelist and academic Rebecca Stott will show this perpetual re-making and ‘making new’ of Darwin’s ideas by taking a literary journey through late nineteenth-century fiction, to the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Ted Hughes and Ruth Padel and to the contemporary novels of Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt to show that writers have not just re-used Darwin’s ideas but have translated, adapted and extended them in fascinating ways.
Biography
Rebecca Stott is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich where she teaches both creative writing and nineteenth-century literature. As an academic she is the author of a number of books and articles about nineteenth-century poets such as Tennyson (1996) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2003), as well as books on the cross-fertilisations of literature and science such as The Fabrication of the Late Nineteenth-Century Femme Fatale (1996) and Oyster (2003). In 2003 she published Darwin and the Barnacle (Faber, 2003) a novelistic study of the eight years Darwin spent dissecting barnacles which received considerable acclaim and reached a wide readership. As a novelist she is the author of Ghostwalk (2003), a historical thriller and ghost story about Isaac Newton’s alchemy set in seventeenth-century Cambridge, which was shortlisted for two literary awards and has been translated into fifteen different languages including Mandarin and Russian. Her second novel, The Coral Thief (2009), a love story set in post-Napoleonic Paris in which a group Lamarkian savants stage an audacious theft from a museum in the Jardin des Plantes in 1815, will be published in August 2009. Her next academic book, Speculators: Poets and Philosophers of Evolution, a study of the migration of evolutionary ideas across Europe pre-Darwin, will be published in 2010 by Chicago University Press.
The relationship between science and the public has provided fruitful material for analysis from a range of academic disciplines, and an important area of policy and practice, in recent years. Studies and experience have revealed a startling complexity, past and present, in science communication, a range of channels (formal, informal, fictional) through which dialogue and debate takes place, and a wide variety of participants in these interactions. Science itself has been reconceptualised, and the complexity of science as a discourse, as practice and as a form of life raises many questions. Science has long been seen as a quest for certainty, even if that goal is unachievable, but our interactions with and examinations of science often reveal, and are characterised by, many uncertainties: what are we encountering, describing and making when we examine science in its many forms? At the same time as this critical examination of the interface between science and the public has been taking place, a dramatic proliferation in modes and amounts of public engagement with science occurred. Science museums, outreach work and edutainment for younger people have achieved new prominence while history of science and popular science texts flourish in the market. This conference will bring together academics and practitioners who have an interest in the intersection of science and non-science, be that in contemporary, past or future societies, to confront and discuss the uncertainties, and certainties, of science and the public.
Dr Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor of Clare College, University of Cambridge
Professor Steve Fuller, Sociology, Warwick University
Individual paper proposals for a 20 minutes presentation should be submitted by abstract (no longer than 300 words) to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com by 14th February 2009. Please include full contact details (name, affiliation, email) of all authors and four keywords.
The conference organizers also encourage full panel submissions and roundtable sessions. Panel proposals should include a panel abstract and individual abstracts for each of the papers on the panel as well as contact information (name, affiliation, email) of the presider (moderator) and all panel members. Roundtable proposals should be a single abstract with names and contact information for all presenters.
In line with previous years the conference fee is expected to be in the region of £50 with concessions for students.
All submissions should be emailed to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com by 14th February 2008. Please send enquires to this address as well.
Tags: CFP, Public Understanding
The 4th annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science will take place at the University of Reading on 27th-29th March, 2009. Keynote speakers will include Dame Gillian Beer, formerly King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge; Patrick Parrinder, Professor of English at the University of Reading; and Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeontology at Cambridge.
The Society invites proposals for 20-minute research papers addressing any aspect of the interaction between literature and science; collaborative panels of two or three papers; and papers or panels on the teaching of literature and science. We welcome work on literature from all periods and countries, and on all aspects of science, including medicine and technology. Presenters need not be based in UK institutions.
Please email proposals of up to 400 words to Dr John Holmes (j.r.holmes@reading.ac.uk) by Monday 1st December, together with a 100-word biographical note (or in the case of a panel, abstracts and notes for each speaker). Please send abstracts in the body of messages; do not use attachments. Alternatively, abstracts and proposals may be posted to Dr John Holmes, Department of English and American Literature, University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 218, Reading, RG6 6AA, UK.
Please address any queries to Dr John Holmes at the email or postal address above.