Articles by Stella Pratt-Smith

University of Stirling, 8-10 July 2011

Keynote speakers: Catherine Maxwell (Queen Mary, University of London), Don Paterson (Poet), and Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton University). Other speakers include John Drakakis (Stirling University), Lorna Hutson (University of St Andrews), Ron Levao (Rutgers University), Cornelia D. J. Pearsall (Smith College) and David G. Riede (Ohio State University)

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the nature and representation of melancholia within poetry and its relationship to poetics and poetic creation from the Renaissance to the present. Drawing together contributors from Art History, Literature, Medical Humanities, Philosophy, and Print Media, Poetry and Melancholia will try to examine the variety of forms that melancholia has historically taken and extend its meaning beyond the social, medical and epistemological norms that had framed it as a sign of mental illness or a way of behaving to that of a cultural idea. We aim to define not only the different configurations and significance of melancholia as mood, feeling, state of mind, and a cultural outlook but also the role that modernity has played in its development from a medical discourse to a dispositional perspective.

Themes: Aesthetics: the sublime, art and longing, decadence, narcissism and loss, revelations of destruction, degeneration, eroticism, melancholy genius, nostalgia, spleen, the states of boredom; Affect: sensibility, solitude and alienation, despair, grief, suffering and sadness, distorted senses, mood as language, psychology, transference, the workings of sympathy, haunting and return; Biomedical sciences: clinical depression, malady, delirium, humors, mental derangement, physiology and pathologies of the mind, psychoanalytic workings of mourning, somatic conditions; Nature, Space, and Landscape: landscape and distance, the resistance of physical objects, conflicts with nature, interior distance and phenomenology; Poetics: creativity, idleness and labour, imagination, inspiration and delirium, the politics of form and genre (allegory, elegy, lyric, and pastoral, etc.), poetry’s relation to the visual and plastic arts; Tradition and History: appropriations of classical theories of melancholia, the idea of tainted inheritance, the traditions of witchcraft and the demonic, the past as loss, writing and memory; Sociology: alienation, anomalies of self-consciousness and the will, fragmentation and conflicts of modernity, otherness, gender, class, race, sexuality, social role of the poet, suicide.

Please submit 300 word abstracts for 20 minute papers or proposals for panels together with a short biographical note or CV to Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and David Miller at poetryandmelancholia@stir.ac.uk by no later than 15 January 2011.

Deadline: Wednesday 30 June, 2010

The concluding conference in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series Modelling Futures: Understanding Risk and Uncertainty. Tuesday, 28 September 2010 to Thursday, 30 September 2010
Location: Gillespie Conference Centre, Clare College, Queens Road, Cambridge and Mill Lane Lecture Rooms 2010.

All disciplines are welcome, and inter-disciplinary treatments are particularly encouraged.  For further details, please see http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/.

Conference organized by the research group Literature and Science, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, The University of Bergen 9-10 December 2010

Invited speakers include:

Nick Daly, Professor of English Literature, University College, Dublin; Joanna Zylinska, Reader in New Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London; Dr. Paola Spinozzi, English literature, University of Ferrara; Ole M. Høystad, Professor of Cultural Studies, Syddansk Universitet, Odense.

As we prepare to enter the second decade of the 21^st century, the long history of fascination with the specifically human and its limits continues to intrigue, constantly inspiring new perspectives, developing in complexity and changing in actuality along with current advances in science and technology. Since La Mettrie published L’Homme Machine in 1747, extending the Cartesian analogy of the machine from its application to animal and human bodies to apply to the bodies and minds of humans, conceptions of the human being as a function of purely physiological processes have grown increasingly dominant. In more and more complex ways, nature and mankind are understood not simply by means of technological advances, but as projections of new technologies. Today’s intelligent machines serve as means as well as models in attempts at understanding and controlling biological as well as cognitive processes. Experiments in cybernetics and bio-cybernetics are producing new combinations of humans, animals and machines: mice with human brain cells, pigs with human blood, genetically engineered or computer-simulated (human) life. At the same time, the post-humanist community of humans, animals and machines remains a site of conflicting ethics and emotions, haunted, some would say, by the “lost soul” of humanism. The fundamental question is still with us: how to think (and rethink) the limits of the human in the wake of the post-humanist critique?

The objective of this conference is to address the changing notions of the human in the age of cyborgs and neuro-implants, but also to open up for longer historical views. We therefore welcome a range of approaches – historical, theoretical, ethical and aesthetical – to the idea of the (specifically) human and its limits; its points of transition and contact with other modes of being (animate or inanimate, virtual or material). Proposed topics might address:

• The role of literature and the arts in defining the nature and limits of the human
• What it means to be human and what it might mean to be non-human: ahuman, ab-human, parahuman
• Aesthetic and cultural preoccupations with mutants, cyborgs, monsters and aliens
• Metamorphosis, hybridity, transformation
• Automatism and animism as defamiliarising devices
• Literary topoi such as naturalism’s bête humaine or futurism’s idealized machines
• Human evolution in relation to technology and tools
• Biotechnology, genetic mapping and engineering; prosthetics
• Cognitive science, Neuroscience and Evolutionary theory
• Historical, philosophical and aesthetic approaches to the body/mind relationship
• Emotion and affect

The organisers invite proposals for twenty-minute research papers on these or other aspects of the conference topic. Please e-mail your proposed topic and preliminary paper title by 30 July, followed by a 250-word abstract by 1 September, to one of the following addresses:

Margareth.hagen@if.uib.no OR Randi.Koppen@if.uib.no OR Margery.Skagen@if.uib.no

The symposium aims to bring together researchers interested in the life, letters and works of John Tyndall, and to discuss the current international project to transcribe his letters of correspondence. The symposium will be held in the Leeds Humanities Research Institute, on Clarendon Place within the University of Leeds. For details, see http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~ph07maf/tyndall.htm. Registration fee £5, to be paid on the day. If you would like to attend the event, please contact Mike Finn (ph07maf@leeds.ac.uk) by Friday 18^th June.