Articles by Stella Pratt-Smith

Call for Papers: Journal special issue

April 2011

Essay proposals are invited for a collection entitled ‘The Cultural Production of Eighteenth-Century Natural Knowledge’. We are developing a collection of essays as a journal special issue which will examine the production and circulation of knowledge about the natural world in the eighteenth century. This interdisciplinary collection will bring together original research on the relationship between science, culture and social practice in the eighteenth century.

The Enlightenment heralded an era of fascination with the workings of the natural world which eventually resulted in the development of large-scale, institutionalized efforts to investigate, categorize and explain nature. But Enlightenment knowledge was not made in the laboratory or the university alone: a complex of social networks outside these walls played a crucial role in making and disseminating new ideas, information and objects. We invite contributions that discuss scientific texts, objects, images, ideas and social networks in terms of the cultural and social conditions of scientific knowledge-making—both inside and outside of institutions. The collection will focus on the cultural and aesthetic frameworks within which medical and natural philosophical knowledge was created, represented and communicated. We hope contributors will pay special attention to historical interactions between different forms of knowledge, addressing how new kinds of ideas and social practices were produced at the points of meeting between artistic and scientific discourses and the moments of crossing between disciplinary, professional and social boundaries. The intention is to examine the cultural dimensions of eighteenth-century enquiry in order to understand what constituted ‘knowledge’ and the social processes of its production, as well as the various imaginative forms employed to make sense of new systems of information.

The essays in this special issue will demonstrate how Enlightenment representations of knowledge, manifested in textual, pictorial or oral form, influenced the development of new ways of knowing and encouraged the participation of new types of scientific practitioner. The first half of the collection will discuss the production and consumption of texts, collections and visual representations. The aim is to understand the relationship between these cultural manifestations and knowledge-making, through an examination of the points of intersection between aesthetic discourse and medical and scientific knowledge. How were scientific and medical ideas created and disseminated in literary texts, epistolary culture, travel writings, works of art, museums and other cultural productions? Who read these texts or studied collections, and how did they relate to them? Part Two will ask what the social consequences of this were for participation in Enlightenment science. By attending to how the circulation of knowledge and particular cultural forms might influence scientific practice, we aim to understand who participated in knowledge-making and how they did so during and in the wake of the Enlightenment. Through reanimating the cultural and social contexts of medical and scientific ideas and practices, this collection asks how people were invited to imagine the natural world as well as what the natural world was imagined to be. By enlarging the cultural and social framework through which we view eighteenth-century knowledge, the essays in this special issue will open up alternate genealogies for the production of ideas and development of new practices central to the emergence of scientific modernity.

We invite proposals on topics including, but not limited to:

-          The literary production of medical and scientific knowledges

-          Social participation in knowledge-making

-          Science and visual culture

-          Enlightenment scholarly networks and the circulation of people and things

-          Scientific objects

-          Science and storytelling

-          Colonialism, geographical movement and the production of knowledge

-          Aesthetic theory and discourses of scientific cognition

The collection will be edited and introduced by Dr Sarah Easterby-Smith (European University Institute) and Dr Emily Senior (University of Warwick), with an afterword by Professor Judith Hawley (Royal Holloway, University of London).

Submissions:

Deadline for proposals (2 pages max, accompanied by a brief biographical statement or CV): 20^th May 2011. Complete essays of c. 7,000 words will be due 15th September 2011.

Please send queries and submissions to:

Sarah Easterby Smith Sarah.Easterby-Smith@alumni.warwick.ac.uk and

Emily Senior E.Senior@alumni.warwick.ac.uk

The Centre for History of Science is delighted to present the Spring series of ever-popular free Friday lunchtime lectures. All are welcome to attend, but please reserve your seat in advance to avoid disappointment! For descriptions of each lecture and to make reservations, please visit http://royalsociety.org/lunchtime-lectures-spring-2011/

 Ghosts of Women Past, Friday 18 February, 1pm-2pm Dr Patricia Fara, Clare College, Cambridge

 Doting on Instruments, Friday 25 February, 1pm-2pm Rebecca Pohancenik, Queen Mary

 Paul Dirac and the religion of mathematical beauty, Friday 4 March, 1pm-2pm Graham Farmelo

Free-thinking and language-planning in the 17th century Royal Society, Friday 11 March, 1pm-2pm Dr William Poole, New College, Oxford

 Science and the Church in the Middle Ages, Friday 18 March, 1pm-2pm Dr James Hannam

 A history of autism: my conversations with the pioneers, Friday 25 March, 1pm-2pm Adam Feinstein

 From butterflies to biochemistry: Frederick Gowland Hopkins and the chemistry of life, Friday 1 April, 1pm-2pm Dr Alison Thomas, Anglia Ruskin University

 ’Behold a New Thing in the Earth!’: Reflections on Science at the Great Exhibition, Friday 8 April, 1pm-2pm Prof. Geoffrey Cantor

 John Soane and the learned societies of Somerset House, Friday 15 April, 1pm-2pm Gillian Darley

The Scientific Instrument Society awards small grants, of up to £500 each, for research on the history of scientific instruments. SIS Research Grants are intended to support new research into the history of scientific instruments. They are not intended to fund activities to which an applicant is already committed. Grants may be used to cover any reasonable costs of research, including travel and photography. Grants cannot be used to purchase equipment, and are not intended to support conference travel, unless there is a specific research dimension. Grants are open to applicants from any country, and both members and non-members of the Scientific Instrument Society may apply.

Please complete an application, as set out on the Grant Application page. Applications should be sent to grants@sis.org.uk . Two rounds of applications will be considered each year. The deadlines for receipt of applications are 1 March and 1 September. Further information can be found at http://www.sis.org.uk/grants/what-we-support.

Thursday 10 March 2011, 6.30pm

Speaker: Professor Lorraine Daston, MaxPlanck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

At Queen Mary, University of London, Arts Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, Mile End.

The Nicolai Rubinstein Lecture in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History is an annual memorial lecture held in honour of the distinguished Renaissance scholar and former Queen Mary colleague, Nicolai Rubinstein. 

Since Antiquity, science (episteme, scientia) has been understood as a privileged form of knowledge: more certain, more rigorous, harder won and longer lived. No one doubted that other forms of knowledge were useful, even essential. Aristotle theorized the techne of the arts and crafts; Cicero wrote of the “natural divination” practiced by farmers, shepherds, and sailors who read the signs of fat times and lean, fair weather and foul. But a line was drawn between knowledge and science and a hierarchy erected – even though the grounds for the distinction varied. Early modern Europe witnessed a radical reconceptualization of science and knowledge and the differences between them – and even a challenge to the very existence of such distinctions. Nowhere was the rethinking of the meaning and status of knowledge and science more dramatic in the realm of experience. Experientia, once the province of knowledge, was cultivated by the learned, who created new forms of scientific knowing and concomitant practices: experimenting, observing, collecting, note-taking, table-making, measuring, archiving. These practices were in part derived from the traditional realm of knowledge (e.g. the experiment from the artisan’s workshop and the observation from the shepherd’s vigil). But in part they relied on the scholar’s skills: reading, excerpting, collating, comparing. “Learned experience” (in Francis Bacon’s phrase) redrew the boundary between knowledge and science in ways that still reverberate in our contemporary classification of the disciplines.

To register and for a map and directions to this event, please go to the Queen Mary website: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/qmul/events/details.php?id=34695 or email: events@qmul.ac.uk.

Hosted by the Museum of the History of Science and Mansfield College, Oxford on Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

The public event ‘Astronomy and Poetry’ was a rarity—one that brought together literature’s stirring power with that of expert scientific knowledge.  Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered radio pulsars as a postgraduate student, is currently Professorial Fellow in Physics at Mansfield College, Oxford.  Until recently, she was president of the Institute of Physics and, in 2010, she received the Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture from the Royal Society in recognition of her excellence in communicating science.  

 Volunteer audience members were privileged to read aloud selected poems from the captivating anthology, Dark Matter: Poems of Space, which Professor Bell Burrell edited with poet Maurice Riordan in 2008, including poems by Diane Ackerman, John Herschel, Stanley Kunitz and Thomas Hardy.  As Paul Murdin of the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy remarked in 2009, ‘we reach for analogy and the architecture of poetry to express dark matter, black holes and red giants.’  Professor Bell’s generous sharing of her astronomical insight and affection for poetry demonstrated not only the aptness of the poetic form for expressing astrophysics but also the inherently poetic virtues of her science.

The event was accompanied by the Museum’s exhibition of science poetry by competition winners, entitled ‘Parallel Universe’ (see http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/events/).

Tuesday 8 February 7.00pm–8.30pm

Speaker: Philip Ball

 Philip Ball delves beneath the surface of the cultural history of ‘anthropoeia’ – the creation of artificial people – to explore what it tells us about our views on life, humanity, creativity and technology, and the soul. He suggests that, from the legendary inventor Daedalus to Goethe’s tragic Faust and the automata-making magicians of E.T.A Hoffmann, the old tales and myths are alive and well, subtly manipulating the current debates about assisted conception, embryo research and human cloning, which have at last made the fantasy of ‘making people’ into some kind of reality.

 Admission: Tickets cost £10, £7 concessions, £5 Ri members. You can book tickets online at www.rigb.org

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

The closing date for receipt of applications is Friday 11^th February 2011.

University of Salford Public Lecture: Tuesday, 22 February 2011 5.30pm — 7.00pm

The next Professorial Inaugural Lecture of the semester will be given by Professor Sharon Ruston, Chair in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture School of English, Sociology, Politics, & Contemporary History and is entitled The Two Cultures of Literature and Science.

The lecture will be held on Tuesday 22 February 2011 in the Lady Hale Lecture Theatre, University of Salford commencing at 17:30. Free, but please register on http://www.salford.ac.uk/events/details/1380 (as tickets are limited) . Your e-ticket will be sent to your email address. Please remember to bring it with you to the event.

About the Lecture

It might seem as though little has changed since the physicist and novelist C. P. Snow’s 1959 lecture coined the phrase ‘two cultures’. Snow saw a ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’ between ‘literary intellectuals’ who did not know the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and scientists, who, with ‘the future in their bones’, found Dickens impossible to read (Snow, 1959). The origins of this divide between the literature and science have been seen in the literature of the Romantic period (1790-1830). William Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ to the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ includes a three thousand-word passage on the differences between ‘the poet’ and ‘the man of science’. Confirmation of this anti-scientific position has been seen in the figure of Victor Frankenstein — a secretive, arrogant overreacher — in Mary Shelley’s novel.

ln this lecture Professor Ruston will look again at these and other texts of the Romantic period to demonstrate, instead, the way that literary and scientific writings influenced and informed each other. Considering examples of what Snow called the ‘creative chances’ that should accompany the ‘clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures’, suggests ways that interdisciplinarity can work to bridge the divide.

About Professor Ruston

Sharon Ruston joined the University of Salford as Chair of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture in January 2009. She took her degrees at the University of Liverpool, and has held previous posts at the Universities of Wales, Bangor, and Keele. She is author of Shelley and Vitality (2005), Romanticism: An Introduction (2007), editor of Essays and Studies: Literature and Science (2008), and co-editor of Teaching Romanticism (2010). She has published a number of articles and essays on the interrelationships between Romantic-period literature, science and medicine.

The 6th annual conference of the Society invites proposals for twenty-minute research papers addressing any aspect of the interaction between literature and science, medicine, and technology; collaborative panels of three themed papers; and papers or panels on the teaching of literature and science. Please email paper proposals of up to 300 words and a short biographical note to the conference organiser Melanie Keene (mjk32@cam.ac.uk). We welcome work on literature from all periods and countries, and on all aspects of the sciences. Papers and panels that include approaches from disciplines other than English studies are equally welcome. The conference will take place this year at Homerton College, Cambridge, 8-10th April 2011. Any queries can be sent to Melanie Keene at the above address. Presenters need not be based in UK institutions.