All those who submitted proposals for the BSLS 2012 conference should have received an email on Wednesday 11 January indicating whether or not their paper was accepted. If you have not, please contact Michael Whitworth on bsls.2012@yahoo.co.uk
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The University of Salford has one AHRC doctoral studentship in English available for an October 2012 start. Literature and Science is one of the fields in which they would especially welcome applications. For further details, see here:
BSLS 2012 Workshop Proposal “Experiments in Theatre: New Directions in Science and Performance”
In 2002, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews published a special issue on Theatre and Science that became the springboard for key debates that have helped to shape and define the field. Since then, several new books and dozens of articles have significantly expanded the scholarship on theatre and science, while a steady flow of new work for the stage has shown that the interactions between science and theatre continue to surprise, delight, and provoke audiences and readers around the world.
Now, a decade on, we plan to hold a workshop that will bring together scholars and practitioners engaging with theatre and science to explore new developments, directions, and explorations in this ever-expanding field. This is an opportunity to share work in progress and get feedback on it, take stock of current trends in the field and suggest new ones.
Format: participants will distribute their papers ahead of the workshop, allowing them to be read beforehand so that on the day we will only need brief summaries from each participant and can devote most of the session to discussion, questions and answers, and targeted responses. We will encourage audience participation in the Q and A.
Topics the workshop might explore include (but are not limited to):
- How has the field evolved and expanded away from the focus on text-based “science plays” like Stoppard’s Arcadia, Wertenbaker’s After Darwin, and Frayn’s Copenhagen to a greater emphasis on performance in its broadest sense, through such diverse practitioners as Complicite (A Disappearing Number), Punchdrunk (Faust), Athletes of the Heart (Yerma’s Eggs), and Clod Ensemble (Performing Medicine)?
- How do theatre and scientific experimentation intersect and cross-fertilize each other?
- How has theatre engaged with relatively recent scientific findings and debates, such as those over climate change and global warming?
- What new modes of performance has the interaction of science with theatre generated?
Please send expressions of interest, a title and an abstract to the convenors below by 30 December 2011.
Convenors of the Workshop
Dr Carina Bartleet (Senior Lecturer in Drama, Oxford Brookes University), c.e.bartleet@brookes.ac.uk
Dr Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (University Lecturer in Modern Drama, University of Oxford),
kirsten.shepherd-barr@ell.ox.ac.uk
The British Society for Literature and Science invites proposals for papers and panels to be delivered at its seventh annual conference, to be held at the English Faculty, University of Oxford, 12-14 April 2012. The deadline for receipt of proposals is Monday 5 December 2011; we anticipate that announcements about acceptances/rejections will be issued 9 January 2012.
Plenary speakers will include Professor Jonathan Sawday (St Louis University), author of The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (1995) and Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (2007), among other works.
There is no theme for this year’s conference, and we hope to receive a wide range of proposals covering a wide range of historical periods. Those unfamiliar with the BSLS may wish to look at past conference programmes and at the short-listed titles in successive book-prize competitions. We would particularly welcome papers that reflect on the state of the field. This might include the state of the field in relation to particular kinds of literature and historical periods; the differences in critical practices in relation to different kinds and periods; differences between British, continental European, and North American approaches; forms of historicism; and the relation of literature and science to neighbouring fields, such as literature and medicine, ecocriticism, evocriticism and other forms of criticism inspired by evolutionary biology.
In addition to regular panels, we would like to hold a series of workshops on the state of the field. Possible topics are: poetry; fiction; drama; teaching literature and science; historicism; dialogues between practitioners in different historical periods. We seek short (ten-minute) position papers defending or criticising particular approaches, or raising larger questions. If you are interested in offering such a paper, please contact the conference organiser by Monday 21 November. Within the workshop segment we also hope to have panel or panels on teaching literature and science: again, if you wish to offer an account of your teaching practice, please contact the conference organiser.
Thanks to a generous donation, there will be a bursary of £150 awarded to a graduate student on the basis on the paper proposals. The student must be registered for a masters or doctoral degree on 9 January 2012.
Proposals for papers of 15-20 minutes, and for panels, should be sent in the body of the email text (no attachments, please), to bsls.2012@yahoo.co.uk. They should consist of: the title; a proposal of no more than 300 words; the title again; the name, postal address, and email address of the proposer; and, if you are applying for the graduate student bursary, the email address of your supervisor or other person who will be able to confirm that you are a registered student.
Accommodation: please note that those attending will need to make their own arrangements for accommodation. As in previous years, we anticipate that the conference will begin at about 1pm on the first day and conclude at about 2pm on the last.
Membership: in order to attend the conference, you must be a paid-up member of the BSLS for 2012. We anticipate that it will be possible to pay the £10 annual membership fee when paying the conference fee online.
Proposals and other enquiries should be sent to the conference organizer, Dr Michael Whitworth, on bsls.2012@yahoo.co.uk.
BSLS Conference, Cambridge, 9 April 2011
I am pleased to announce that we are now ready to take BSLS 2011 Conference Bookings online at:
https://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/browse/product.asp?catid=1086&modid=1&compid=1
The full fee is £75, the reduced rate (for postgraduate students) is £55. Please remember that to attend you need to have paid your BSLS membership fee (£10/year); if you’ve not yet done so, you can add membership to your virtual basket.
Because we will need to confirm numbers for catering on Monday 4 April, it is planned that the shop will close at midnight local time on Sunday 3 April. For administrative simplicity we would prefer all those planning to attend to book through the online shop, but if this presents difficulties for you, please contact Dan and Michael (daniel.cordle@ntu.ac.uk and michael.whitworth@merton.ox.ac.uk).
In using the shop, please note the following:
(1) You first need to register. This is relatively quick.
(2) The shop will ask for your “delivery address”, but in this case you will not receive anything through the post.
(3) We’d like to know your institutional affiliation for the sake of the name badge.
(4) At present the shop does not automatically email you a receipt, so if you need one, please print out the appropriate screen. When you book, the Faculty Office receive a “Sale Notification Email”, and they will forward this in due course.
(5) If you want confirmation that the transaction went through, you can log back in again and look at your “Order History” at the bottom
The online shop is hosted by Oxford University, and we’re grateful to the English Faculty for setting it up. The Faculty and the University are not involved in the conference in any other way, so please don’t address queries to them.
I’ll be posting the conference programme here on Friday.
Michael Whitworth, 24 March 2011
We have been asked to alert the membership to the research potential of writings by Victorian writer, Grace Stebbing. Her work has yet to receive any form of scholarly attention and very little is known about her. Indeed, despite her numerous volumes (many of which are listed on Google Books), few if any are currently in print.
It is thought that Stebbing was the daughter of Henry Stebbing (1799-1883), British poet, preacher, and historian. An 1898 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography suggests that ‘two of Stebbing’s sons, Mr. William Stebbing and Mr. Thomas Roscoe Rede Stebbing, F.R.S., have distinguished themselves respectively in literature and science; while two daughters, Beatrice (now Mrs. Batty) and Miss Grace Stebbing, are also well known as authors. The eldest son, John (d. 1885), translated Humboldt’s ‘Letters to a Lady’ and Their’s ‘History of France under Napoleon’…’
We would be happy to learn of any members with a scholarly interest in Grace Stebbing, knowledge of anyone who is investigating her work, or someone who would like to do so.
Call for Papers:
The logic of the virus has become endemic. Viral ads mirror contagion to convey their message. Computers and systems are struck down by infections. Pigs and birds are transformed into sinister hosts. Terrorists form cells and virulent covert networks, globalisation becomes a creeping homogenisation attacking the idiosyncratic, and media rapidly evolve to overcome any censorial attempt at information immunisation.
We all live with the virus. Or perhaps, as the planet’s most abundant biological entity, the virus lives with us. It crosses boundaries of species and holds genotype in little regard, finding hosts in every form of life. This tenacious agent has escaped the confines of laboratories and medical institutions, and insinuated itself into all strands of our cultural, political, and technological discourses.
Excursions invites submissions that examine the theme of ‘Virus’, in all its potential interpretations. Submissions may wish to consider, but are by no means limited to:
• The virus as a model and/or metaphor
• The politics and economics of the pandemic, epidemic and endemic
• Viral dissemination
• The synthetic and the viral
• The viral and systemic vulnerability
• The socio-cultural and scientific history of the virus
• Life, death and the place of the virus in evolution
• Bacteriophages or the good virus
• Contamination and the text/body/performance
• Parasitism vs. viral infection
• Viral hosts and hospitality
• The rhetoric of the virus/viral rhetoric
• Artistic (re)presentations of/responses to virulent virtual media
• What does immunity mean?
• Viral identities – from living with infection to infectious trends
• The antiseptic space
Papers should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words, follow MHRA formatting guidelines and be submitted via the Excursions website. Please contact enquiries@excursions-journal.org.uk regarding other forms of submission (i.e. film, photography, poetry etc). Please include an abstract and a brief biography (no more than 150 words) along with your submission, not later than 30th October 2010.
Tags: CFP
This entry on The Guardian’s Theatre Blog might interest BSLS members, as might the discussion strand following it:
“Why does theatre plus science equal poor plays”, by Alexis Soloski
Tags: theatre
Narratives and Knowledge.
The Early Modern Scientific Anecdote (16-17th centuries)
New College Symposium, University of Oxford
22-23 September 2009
Organisers : Frédérique Aït-Touati and Anne Duprat
For further details, contact frederique.ait-touati@new.ox.ac.uk