http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk/vacancies/index.cfm?fuseaction=vacancies.furtherdetails&vacancy_ref=3015150

Researching Literature and Science: A Roundtable

Professor Nick Battey (Head of Environmental Biology, University of Reading), Dr John Holmes, Dr Andrew Mangham, Dr Ulrika Maude, and Dr Stephen Thomson (English Literature, University of Reading)

Monday 5th December, 6 p.m., Humanities and Social Sciences building G74

No There There: The Infinitesimal Sublime in Victorian Poetry and Physics

Professor Herbert Tucker (John C. Coleman Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature, University of Virginia)

Wednesday 14th December, 5 p.m. Humanities and Social Sciences building 125

All welcome. Please email John Holmes (j.r.holmes@reading.ac.uk) for further details.

The programme for the next meeting of the University of London Interdisciplinary Discussion Group has now been finalised. Details are below and can also be found on our website. http://londoninterdisciplinarydiscussiongroup.wordpress.com/ Please email Susie Christensen (susie.christensen@kcl.ac.uk) if you would like to be added to the mailing list for this group.

Monday 23^rd January 2012, 5-7pm in K3.11 Raked Lecture Theatre, King’s College London, King’s Building, Strand Campus, Strand, London

On 23^rd January we will meet for the third time to discuss the topic of language. Our three speakers will address this topic from their respective disciplinary and professional backgrounds.  Each speaker will present for 20 minutes and then there will be an hour for questions and general discussion on this topic both in relation to the papers presented and with regards to the work of others present. This will also be a chance to reflect on interdisciplinarity in general and how the combination of these three papers enriches our understanding of the topic ‘language’

Programme

Laura Salisbury, Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College and RCUK Fellow in Science, Technology and Culture

Oiwi Parker Jones, Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL and at Wolfson College, Oxford

Helena Ballard, Teacher of the Deaf and associate of Life and Deaf

More Information on the speakers

Helena Ballard

Helena Ballard is an Advisory Teacher of the Deaf in Greenwich. Much of her current focus is on work with families who have newly diagnosed babies and small children, although she also goes into mainstream schools to support hearing impaired children and the staff who work with them.   A French graduate and lover of music, she came late to the field of deafness and to British Sign Language, both of which she finds fascinating.  Life and Deaf has been an important and stimulating addition for the past five years.

Life and Deaf started in a secondary mainstream unit for deaf students in Greenwich and came from a poetry project school-wide.  Working with specialist Speech and Language Therapists, Jane Thomas and Katie Martin, the deaf students  explored their identities through the medium of poetry, producing such powerful and rich work that a beautifully illustrated book of their poems was produced, accompanied by a DVD of the young poets speaking or signing their poetry. The aims of the project included the exploration of the beauty of language but also its power in allowing access to difficult or unexplored emotions which might affect mental health.  At a launch subsequently it became apparent that the students, their friends and families were so motivated and positively affected by the whole process that there were lasting and important benefits.  As a result the Life and Deaf Association was formed and the project was rolled out nationwide, with a web-site, a workbook to encourage wider participation and many other activities.  Life and Deaf 2 will culminate in a launch on the South Bank in March 2012.

She will be discussing he work teaching deaf children and Life and Deaf, and what these two things contribute to our understanding of language.

Oiwi Parker Jones

Oiwi Parker Jones is a linguist and neuroscientist whose research focuses on models of language in healthy and damaged brains, particularly in bilingual populations. He is particularly interested in (1) how multiple languages are represented in a single brain and (2) how bilinguals recover each language after brain damage due to cancer or stroke. His research uses a variety of methods, including anatomical and functional neuroimaging and dynamic network-based modelling. Other areas of research include the neuroscience of reading and sign-language, as well as topics in general linguistics, such as language documentation and activism (especially of endangered and Eastern Polynesian languages).”

He will be talking about his various investigations into language.

Laura Salisbury

Laura Salisbury is author of Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950). She has published a number of essays on aphasia and literary modernism and her major current research project is a book-length study of the relationship between modernism, modernity, and early twentieth-century neuroscientific conceptions of language. Other forthcoming work includes co-editing a volume called Kittler Now (Polity), co-editing a special issue of Medical Humanities on the topic of ‘Beckett and the Brain’, and writing a chapter on narratives of the brain in contemporary British Fiction for The Decades Project: International Perspectives on Contemporary British Fiction (Continuum).

She will talk about these aspects of her work in relation to the topic of language.

An Interdisciplinary Conference

14-16 June 2012

Northumbria University

Keynote Speakers

• Professor Joel P. Eigen (Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania)
• Professor Melinda A. Rabb (Professor of English, Brown University, Rhode Island)
• Dr. Judith A. Tucker (Lecturer in the School of Design, Leeds University)

This cross-period and interdisciplinary conference seeks to situate and interpret states of mind from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first questioning how the space, place mand historical context in which mental states are experienced shaped the narratives produced by individuals. Interweaving perspectives from across such disciplines as literature, history, philosophy, art history, performance, fine art, creative writing, psychology and sociology, the conference will explore accounts of states of mind including mental illness, dreams, sleep-walking, imaginative states and self-awareness. The conference seeks to assess how these varying states of consciousness are expressed and how such narratives are influenced by historical change, continuity or the reconfiguration of these forms of expression.

We would like to invite abstracts for papers from across disciplines on the theme of the conference, particularly related, but not limited, to the following key strands:

Experience and Representation of Mental Illness

- the gap between individual experience and interpretations by medical and legal practitioners

- the relationship between mental distress, agency, literature and cognition

- representations of mental derangement and criminal responsibility

Liminal States of Mind

- representations of liminal states of consciousness

- the relationship between experiences and representations of dreams and sleepwalking

- categorisation of imaginative states in cognitive science and philosophy

- concepts of interiority, selfhood and imaginative processing of real or fictional worlds

Self-awareness and Place

- relationship between self and place, particularly regarding the past and decay

- artistic expressions of situating self-awareness

- creative representations of landscape as a geographic metaphor

Abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute papers should be submitted by 31 January 2012 to the conference organisers: anita.oconnell@northumbria.ac.uk or leigh.wetheralldickson@northumbria.ac.uk. See www.northumbria.ac.uk/statesofmind for details.

Exhibition Road Cultural Group London

Supersonix Conference

Exhibition Road

London SW7

21 to 23 June 2012

www.litsciarts.org

www.slsa-europe.eu

www.exhibitionroad.com

A partnership between Exhibition Road Cultural Group and SLSA EU the Supersonix conference will present new theoretical, scientific and artistic works and experiments that explore the complexity of sound, thinking about sound, and capturing sound. The conference is intended for practitioners from the arts, curatorial studies, the sciences, humanities and social sciences interested in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of sound and sonification.

Call for Papers

We are looking for proposals for papers, panels and workshops exploring and experimenting with sound and sonification from the angle of noise – sound as submitted to informatic coding and transmission; signal and interference; musical noise, timbre; noise pollution; literary metaphorics of noise – and for proposals concerning the significance of human and non-human sound in the history of science, technology and culture. Papers and workshops should reflect the latest debates in the field, be theoretically grounded and talk to the topic.

Please submit an abstract of max. 250 words and a short biography of max. 100 words by e-mail no later than 30 November 2011 to Grace Heggs, grace@exhibitionroad.com

Applications and papers must be written in English. Invitations for presentations will be sent out on 25 January 2012.

Selection committee: Yves Abrioux (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis), Bergit Arends (Curator for Contemporary Art, Natural History Museum London), Tim Boon (Head of Research and Public History, Science Museum, London), Bruno Clarke (Department of English, Texas Tech University), Sher Doruff (Rietveld Academy of Art and Design, Amsterdam), Helen Frosi (SoundFjord London), Hannah Redler (Head of Arts Projects, Science Museum London), Manuela Rossini (Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, University of Bern) and others

Confirmed speakers include: Barry Blesser (architect), Bernhard Leitner (architect/sound artist), David McAlpine (Director, University College London Ear Institute), Sophie Scott (Professor at the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London), Jonathan Sterne (media historian), David Toop (artist, writer and curator), Jana Winderen (artist)

About Society for Literature, Science and the Arts – EU

The European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSAeu) fosters the inter-and transdisciplinary exchange between the arts, sciences, medicine and technology. The Society welcomes practitioners from the arts, including curatorial studies, sciences, the humanities, and social sciences. SLSAeu has grown out of the US SLSA, which has staged a biennial international conference since 2000 in major European cities.

Exhibition Road Cultural Group (ERCG)

The Exhibition Road Cultural Group is made up of 16 national and international cultural and educational organisations, along with two local councils. Together, the members comprise the most popular tourism destination in Britain, every year attracting more than 24m physical visits, as well as 520m hits on their websites. ERCG champions the collective view of the area, devises large-scale collaborative arts and science projects, free for the broadest audiences, and plays a lead role in restoring the area’s profile as the world’s most concentrated and diverse cultural quarter. Supersonix is ERCG’s headline project for London’s 2012 Olympic year.

Please send nominations, giving the author(s) or editor(s), 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 2012.

* 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); George Levine for ‘Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science’ (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Leah Knight for ‘Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture’ (Ashgate, 2009); and Sally Shuttleworth for ‘The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900’ (Oxford University Press, 2010).

* 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 2011 as its publication date.

* The winner of this year’s prize will be announced at the next annual conference of the BSLS in April 2012.

* The prize will be paid by means of a cheque made out in pounds sterling.

http://royalsociety.org/exhibitions/one-culture/

********

This Interdisciplinary Conference has been organised jointly by Nicholas
Campion (School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology, Sophia Centre for
the Study of Cosmology in Culture, University of Wales Trinity Saint David)
and Darrelyn Gunzburg (Department of History of Art, University of Bristol)

Wills Memorial Building
University of Bristol
14-16 October 2011

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

* Professor Ronald Hutton, University of Bristol.
* Gillian Clarke, Poet Laureate of Wales.
* Professor Roger Beck, Emeritus Professor, Department of Classics,
University of Toronto.
* Professor Gerry Gilmore, Professor of Experimental Philosophy, Institute
of Astronomy, Cambridge University.
* Adjunct Professor David Malin, British-Australian astronomer and
photographer, former Anglo-Australian Observatory.
* Dr Ed Krupp, Director, Griffith Observatory, CA, USA.
* Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson, Department of Physics, Imperial
College, London.

CONFERENCE THEME
On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human in outer space and the
first to orbit the Earth. 2011 sees the fiftieth anniversary of that event.
In almost every human culture the sky functions as a backdrop for mythical
encounters, employing the celestial environment as a stage set for
narratives of human and divine experience. That moment when human beings
first left the planet gave us a different perspective on the sky.

THE EVENT
This conference will bring together scholars through keynote addresses (60
minutes), plenary session (30 minutes) and concurrent panel sessions (3 x
20 minutes) to examine the relationship between the heavens and culture
through the arts, literature, religion and philosophy, both in history and
the present. We have accepted proposals from 80 academics in the arts,
humanities, social sciences and sciences. Topics include astronomy and
music, literature, painting and the visual arts, architecture, religion,
history and society. A selection of papers from the Conference proceedings
will be published by the Sophia Centre Press in 2012.

THE EXHIBITION
The conference is proud to present an exhibition of David Malin’s
extraordinary and beautiful pioneering space photography. The exhibition,
Visions of Heaven, will be curated by Darrelyn Gunzburg and held at The
Bristol Gallery. The exhibition will be launched with a champagne reception
(included in the conference registration) on Friday evening 14th October.
You will be able to buy art works signed by David at the launch.
——–
Born in 1941 in Summerseat, Lancashire, UK, Malin explored photography from
an early age, trained as a chemist and worked as microscopist. When he
moved to Sydney, Australia, and joined the Anglo-Australian Observatory as
its photographic scientist in 1975, he shifted from exploring the
infinitely small to the infinitely far away. Malin was a pioneer in making
true-color astronomical photographs from black and white plates taken in
three separate colors. The novel image enhancement techniques were all
incorporated into creating unique three-color photographs of previously
unseen deep space objects. These new ways of extracting information from
astronomical photographs, known as ‘Malinisation’, revolutionized our
cultural relationship with the sky.
————-

PRE- AND POST-CONFERENCE TOURS:
* Half-day walking tour of Bristol Cathedral and St Mary Redcliffe Church
with Jon Cannon (Thursday 13th October).

* Full day coach tour of Glastonbury Abbey, Wells Cathedral and the
Bishop’s Palace with Jon Cannon (Monday 17th October). Due to the need to
travel by coach, this tour has limited numbers.

REGISTRATION
Student rate (undergraduate or postgraduate): £90
Early payment up to 30th June 2011: £195
Late payment from 1st July: £225
Day passes: £75

STUDENT BURSARIES
Available for students of The University of Bristol and The University of
Wales Trinity Saint David.

‘Heavenly Discourses’ is proudly supported by the University of Bristol
Alumni Fund and thus is able to offer bursaries entitling full or part-time
students of The University of Bristol and The University of Wales Trinity
Saint David to a registration fee of £15/day. (This price does not include
the champagne reception and tickets for this can be purchased separately on
the website).

Further information or enquiries:
hadrg@bristol.ac.uk