• The ichthyosaurus and its representations by JOHN GLENDENING
• Hoffmann’s motifs of physical movement by VAL SCULLION
• The sonnet and geometry by MATTHEW CHIASSON & JANINE ROGERS
• Additionally there are reviews of recent journal articles by Laura Voracheck,
• Anna Henchman, Mandy Reid and Danielle Coriale.

The JLS is online and free to access and can be found at: http://literatureandscience.research.glam.ac.uk/journal/home

The JLS is now accepting the submission of articles, and reviews of recent journal articles for future issues. Please make any enquiries with the
Editor-in-Chief, Martin Willis, on mwillis@glam.ac.uk.

Indepenpress

Ann Lingard is a former scientist, and founder of  SciTalk (www.scitalk.org.uk) the free resource that helps fiction-writers to find out about modern science, and meet and talk to scientists; all her own novels have some science and scientists in them, but are not ‘about’ science.

The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes is set in present-day Cumbria and follows the interacting lives of three women: Madeleine, a widowed sheep-farmer; Ruth, a taxidermist; and Lisa, a mathematician who is also achondroplasic. Interspersed within the story are Ruth’s ‘blogs’, a fascinating mixture of musings, information and anecdote about the Dutch and Scottish anatomists and much more — and the book’s striking cover (an image of a glass and bone eye from Peter the Great’s collection, photographed by Rosamond Wolff Purcell, who worked with Stephen Jay Gould) carries a hint as to the story within.

Many of the fascinating images and short videos that lie behind the story can be seen on Ann’s website, www.annlingard.com

Some reviews and comments about the book:

“An intriguing novel in a haunting setting, rich in texture, humorous and concerned, raising important questions about science and our relation to the natural world, to the individuals we know and to the communities we live in. A lovely book. “ Jenny Uglow 

‘An exhilarating and compelling read. A powerful and haunting story of genetic difference, interwoven with maths, taxidermy, and the tragedy of foot and mouth disease. ‘ Professor Sir John Sulston, Nobel Laureate

“A many-faceted novel …The account of the dreadful days of foot-and-mouth disease in the last epidemic is agonising and the Cumbrian accent is perfect” Jane Gardam

 ‘A charming, intelligent and engrossing book, with enough dark heart to drag it away from the domain of standard female fiction fare and into much more engaging territory.  I found myself drawn in by the delicate prose and fascinating descriptions … an engrossing and enjoyable read. Kat Arney, LabLit.com

‘A rich, absorbing, intriguing novel … All of (the characters)  felt like real people, whom I would want to know. And they were dealing with authentic issues; from everyday problems like relationships and family rivalry to the impact of foot-and-mouth on the local Cumbrian community and the implications of unravelling the genome for people like Lisa. … An absorbing, clever writer ….‘  Mary Zacaroli, Oxford Times

Decoding the heavens

Speaker: Jo Marchant

In 1900, a group of sponge divers blown off course in the Mediterranean discovered an ancient shipwreck, dating from around 70 BC. Lying unnoticed for months amongst the divers’ hard-won haul was what appeared to be a formless lump of corroded rock. Then it cracked open, revealing gearwheels, inscriptions and precisely marked scales – it was and still is the most stunning scientific artefact we have from antiquity. For more than a century this ‘Antikythera mechanism’ has puzzled academics. Author Jo Marchant will tell the story of the 100-year quest to understand this ancient computer and will explain how it used surprisingly sophisticated astronomy to accurately predict the motions of the heavens. This is a story that challenges our assumptions about technology transfer over the ages while giving us fresh insights into history itself.

Admission: Tickets cost £8, £6 concessions, £4 Ri members. You can book tickets online at www.rigb.org or by calling the Events Team on 020 7409 2992 9.00am-5.00pm Monday to Friday.

Venue: The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS

For more information please visit www.rigb.org

The Editor-in-Chief, Martin Willis, would be glad to receive reviews and review queries by email to mwillis@glam.ac.uk

The JLS can be accessed at www.literatureandscience.research.glam.ac.uk/journal/

Tuesday 7 April 7.00pm-8.30pm

Speaker: Prof Mark Brake and Rev Neil Hook

Since its emergence in the 17th century science fiction has been a sustained, coherent and subversive check on the promises and pitfalls of science. In turn, invention and discovery have forced writers to confront the nature and limits of reality. This lecture explores how this fascinating symbiosis shapes what we see and do and how we dream of the future.

Admission: Tickets cost £8, £6 concessions, £4 Ri members. You can book tickets online at www.rigb.org or by calling the Events Team on 020 7409 2992 9.00am-5.00pm Monday to Friday.

Venue: The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS

For more information please visit www.rigb.org

‘The age of wonder’ a lecture by Prof Richard Holmes

In this lecture Richard Holmes tells the story of three remarkable scientific friendships during the Romantic Age in Britain. The astronomers William and Caroline Herschel, the chemists Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday and the medical scientists, John Abernethy and William Lawrence all challenged traditional ideas about human identity, morality and religious belief. They were pioneers in a time where distinctions between poetry, art and science were yet to take hold.

Holmes presents an age on the cusp of modernity, when science and faith in God were mutually incompatible, and shows through the vivid dramas of his central relationships how ideas are nurtured, scientific discoveries made, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide.

This lecture seeks to answer questions that are as relevant to us as they were to Coleridge’s generation: What are the sources of creativity? In what sense is there a human soul? Is it a fundamental mistake to regard science as a purely rational pursuit, or must we also recognise it as an imaginative and emotional one?

Admission: Tickets cost £8, £6 concessions, £4 Ri members. You can book tickets online at www.rigb.org or by calling the Events Team on 020 7409 2992 9.00am-5.00pm Monday to Friday.

Venue: The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS

For more information please visit www.rigb.org

An international, Interdisciplinary Conference

Cardiff University, UK
Thursday 2*Friday 3 July 2009

Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Imre Szemán (McMaster University, Canada)
Dr Charlie Gere (Lancaster University, UK)

What are the cultural implications of living under conditions of global, manufactured risk?

In the twentieth century, the possibility arose for the first time that a crisis of planetary proportions might result from human activities. By the early decades of the century, global economic and financial interdependence was such that a crisis unfolding in one location could radiate outwards to destabilize the entire socio-economic world-system. Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the risk of pandemic upheaval has been heightened by an array of phenomena: the expansion and acceleration of media and telecommunications networks; the integration of financial markets and the instantaneous ramification of market fluctuations via programme trading; nuclear proliferation; international terrorism; rapid population growth; unsustainable consumption of natural resources; overload of electricity grids, leading to cascading power failures; pollution of the ecosphere and resulting climate change; computer viruses and *cyber-warfare*; genetic engineering; cloning; nanotechnology; artificial intelligence; bioweaponry; the emergence and rapid spread of new strains of infectious disease; and the development of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Scholars speak of *systemic risk* (Anthony Giddens), *simultaneous crisis formation* (David Harvey), a *general disaster* (Brian Massumi), *worst imaginable accidents* (Ulrich Beck), *total risk of catastrophe* (François Ewald), *global* or *integral* accidents (Paul Virilio), *global catastrophic risks* (Nick Bostrom and Milan *irkovi*), and *modernist events* * *events which not only could not possibly have occurred before the twentieth century but the nature, scope, and implications of which no prior age could even have imagined* (Hayden White).

Such occurrences hover indeterminably somewhere between the possible, the probable, and the inevitable. This conference will explore how writers, artists, filmmakers, dramatists, philosophers, and critical and cultural theorists have responded to the prospect and reality of global crisis. Moreover, it will ask how the methodologies of textual and cultural criticism might offer new insights into our age of global risk.

Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

-Notions of futurity, messianism, and the à venir (*to come*)
-Modernism and the first era of globalization
-Figurations of the contemporary, postmodern, or technological sublime
-The alteration and/or realization of textual meanings in the wake of catastrophic events
-Connections between conditions of global risk and the aesthetic or intellectual *risks* taken by experimental artists and thinkers
-Disaster films
-Ecocriticism and climate change
-Future ruins
-The fate of the archive
-*Nuclear Criticism* and its possible revival post-9/11
-(Post-)apocalyptic visions
-Cyberculture and utopian/dystopian futures
-The cultural implications of Kondratiev waves and world-systems theory

Please send 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers to the organizer, Dr Paul Crosthwaite, at globalrisk@cardiff.ac.uk by Monday 22 December 2008. Proposals for three-person panels are also welcome; please send a brief description of the panel along with abstracts for the individual papers.

Updates will appear on the conference web site: http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/globalrisk

UNIVERSITY OF GLAMORGAN, CARDIFF, SEPTEMBER 12

THE JLS

The Journal of Literature and Science is a new, peer-reviewed, online journal hosted by Glamorgan’s Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science, founded in 2006. The Centre directors are Professors Andrew Smith & Jeff Wallace, and Dr Martin Willis, who is also the Journal of Literature and Science’s Editor. The Journal’s online home can be found at: http://literatureandscience.research.glam.ac.uk/journal

JLS AIMS

The JLS is dedicated to the publication of academic essays on the subject of literature and science, broadly defined. Essays on the major forms of literary and artistic endeavour are welcome (the novel, short fiction, poetry, drama, periodical literature, visual art, sculpture, radio, film and television). The journal encourages submissions from all periods of literary and artistic history since the Scientific Revolution. The journal also encourages a broad definition of ‘science’: encapsulating both the history and philosophy of science and those sciences regarded as either mainstream or marginal within their own, or our, historical moment.

REVIEW FOR THE JLS

The JLS uniquely focuses its reviews section on published journal articles in the fields of literature and science and the cultural history of science. If you would like to review a recent article for the JLS please contact the editor. See Issue 1 on the JLS Web for examples.

THE LAUNCH

The journal launch will end a day of seminar activities dedicated to the study of literature and science and organised around the theme of Romantic Science. The seminar welcomes Professor Anne Janowitz as its plenary speaker, who will lecture on the plurality of worlds in debate in Romantic astronomy. Other speakers include Dr Sharon Ruston (author of Shelley and Vitality) and Dr Rachel Hewitt (author of the forthcoming Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey). The seminar will begin at 10am and will conclude with a wine reception and the Journal launch at 5.30pm. Further details of the day can be found on the Research Centre website at: http://literatureandscience.research.glam.ac.uk/events/romsci

The event will take place in central Cardiff, at Glamorgan University’s new campus, the Atrium. For travel and location details please see http://cci.glam.ac.uk

You are very welcome to attend either the full day seminar, or the launch of the JLS. Please RSVP: Dr Martin Willis by email at mwillis@glam.ac.uk, or in writing to Journal of Literature and Science, Department of English, University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, CF37 1DL.

CARDIFF, SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

The University of Glamorgan’s Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science will host the next meeting of the Wales and the West Romanticism Seminar on the subject of Romantic Science. The seminar will be held at our Cardiff campus, the Atrium, on September 12, 2008.

We are delighted to announce that the plenary speaker will be Prof. Anne Janowitz, who will be speaking on ’“Longing for Other Worlds”: The Plurality of Worlds Debate and the Sciences of Infinity’.

Other speakers include:

Dr Sharon Ruston, author of Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan) and Romanticism (Continuum)

Dr Rachel Hewitt, author of the forthcoming Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (Granta)

Details about the seminar can be reached at http://literatureandscience.research.glam.ac.uk/events/wawr/.

Information on the cost of the event (which will be minimal), the seminar site, and travel will be posted on the seminar webpage nearer to the event.

*There may still be space to offer to present a paper on the day – please contact the organisers for further information*

There will be an opportunity for all participants (not just those presenting papers) to submit an article for publication in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Literature and Science (http://literatureandscience.research.glam.ac.uk/journal/).

For further information and to register a place, please contact either Andy Smith (asmith5@glam.ac.uk) or Rachel Hewitt (rhewitt@glam.ac.uk) at the Research Centre for Literature, Arts, and Science. Places are limited so please do register as soon as possible.

August 20-21, 2007

Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science, University of Glamorgan, Wales, UK

Plenary Speakers: Tim Armstrong, Kelly Hurley & Jonathan Sawday

To consider how the body has been pathologized is to ask questions of what it means to be human. As the originating site of humanity the body (extending from the individual to society and nation) is the physical, metaphorical and philosophical place for the inscription of selfhood, identity, normality and change. The multiple pathologies of the body invite us to reflect upon bodily conditions and behaviours that mark out the boundaries of the individual, the social and the national as well as their transgressions. Where does the self begin and end? How do we construct normality, deformity, and monstrosity? How do culture, society and the individual relate and connect across the many pathologies that invade, infect, distress and reconstruct the human?

The conference organisers invite the submission of abstracts for 20 minute papers dealing with pathologies (broadly defined) across the intersections of literature and science or the arts and science. Papers may deal with any historical, artistic or literary period. Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

• Representations of disease
• The Socio-politics of medical research
• The art and science of early modern medicine/pathology
• Dissection
• The body and the machine
• Gothic bodies
• Cultural pathologies of identity
• Pathologizing gender through science
• Neurasthenia and modernism
• The degenerate body

Your abstract should be no more than one page of A4 (approx 400-500 words), should include details of your university affiliation and position and should be sent to each of the Conference organisers, and Co-Directors of the Centre: Professor Andrew Smith, Professor Jeff Wallace and Dr Martin Willis by March 31, 2007. Decisions will be made in April 2007.

“PATHOLOGIES: Questions of embodiment in literature, arts and sciences�? is the inaugural conference of the Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science, based at the University of Glamorgan.