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Cfp: Looking back on the End of Time

May 15, 2009 in CFP, Events, News by Stuart Robertson | Permalink

Looking back on the End of Time — Modernism and Beyond

University of East Anglia, UK

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Randall Stevenson (University of Edinburgh) and Dr
Bryony Randall (University of Glasgow)

At the turn of the twentieth century developments in the sciences and
technology seemed to necessitate a radical review of the nature, perhaps
even the existence, of time. This interdisciplinary conference will look
at ways in which key figures from this period conceptualised and
represented these changes, and at how this period has been represented
since. Papers will range from the history of science to philosophy and
literature. Further details on the conference website.

Abstracts of 300-400 words should be sent to Kate Armond or Simon de Bourcier by Wednesday June 3rd 2009.

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Cfp: Dickens and Science

May 11, 2009 in CFP, Events by Alice Jenkins | 0

DICKENS DAY – Dickens and Science

Saturday 10 October 2009, London

G. H. Lewes famously criticised Dickens’s failure to engage with contemporary scientific thought and proffer psychologically convincing characters, describing them as ‘frogs whose brains have been taken out for physiological purposes’. Recent work, however, has significantly challenged the truism that Dickens was indifferent or even hostile towards the scientific discoveries and discourses of his age. Dubbed a member of ‘the steam-whistle party’ by Ruskin, he was volubly enthusiastic about technological and scientific advancements and discoveries, including steam-driven modes of transport and manufacture, industrialism, geology, evolutionary biology and the mutual relations of humanity and animal life. He also had interests in mesmerism, phrenology and physiology. From his enthusiastic article ‘The Poetry of Science’ (Examiner, 9 December 1848) to Little Dorrit’s fictional locomotive Mr Pancks, who ‘snorted and sniffed and puffed and blew, like a little labouring steam-engine’ and the ‘Megalosaurus’ stalking the opening of Bleak House, Dickens’s oeuvre contains multiple traces of contemporary scientific thought.

This one-day conference seeks to explore scientific and technological ideas and metaphors in Dickens’s novels and journalism and to place his life, work and thought in the context of Victorian science. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the theme and warmly encourage postgraduate students to apply.

Topics could include but are not limited to:

Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary theories and metaphors
Geology and palaeontology
Hereditary transmission of behaviour and the biology of character
Affect and emotion
Inventors and new technologies
Professionalisation and the emergence of science as a discipline
Criminality, detection and forensics
Physiognomy, phrenology and the science of the grotesque
Mesmerism and spiritualism
Psychology, cognition and mental illness
Gender, sexuality and the science and politics of normalisation
Energy and thermodynamics
Vivisection
Psychological (im)plausibility, melodramatic aesthetics and radical politics
The ‘dismal sciences’: economics, political economy and Utilitarianism

Please send proposals (maximum 500 words), together with details of your institutional affiliation (if any) to Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard, at hf35@le.ac.uk and jwiny02@students.bbk.ac.uk. The deadline for paper proposals is 31 May 2009.

Cfp: Thomas de Quincey, Manchester and Medicine 1785-1859

April 3, 2009 in CFP, Events, News by Alice Jenkins | 0

A one-day conference on this subject will be held at the University of Salford on Friday 4th
December 2009.

It has been 150 years since Thomas de Quincey died on the 8th December
1859. Conference papers are invited on any topic concerning his work,
Manchester, and medicine, during the period of his lifetime (1785-1859).

Plenary speaker Peter Kitson (author of Romantic Literature, Race, and
Colonial Encounter, 2008) will speak on ‘Mr De Quincey and Dr White: The
Racial Politics of Manchester Medicine’, and Grevel Lindop (author of The
Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, 1981) will speak on ‘Confessions
and Case Histories: De Quincey and the Medical Sublime’. We are hoping to
show an exhibition of de Quincey books from the University of Salford’s
archives to accompany the conference.

Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to Sharon Ruston,
s.ruston@salford.ac.uk , by 31st May 2009.

This conference is sponsored by BARS, the British Association for Romantic
Studies.

Conference announcement: Sex, Ethics and Psychology

March 31, 2009 in Events, News by Alice Jenkins | 0

Sex, Ethics and Psychology: The Networks and Cultural Context of Albert Moll (1862-1939). A two-day conference examining the work of Albert Moll in the context of late Imperial and Weimar Germany medicine, culture and society and also looking at the international impact of his work.

Sponsored by the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine supported by the Wellcome Trust

Thursday 5th – Friday 6th November, 2009

Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease, Durham University, Wolfson Research Institute, Queen’s Campus, Stockton-on-Tees, TS17 6BH.

Cfp: Conference on Numeracy

March 26, 2009 in Events, News by Alice Jenkins | 0

Numeracy: Historical, philosophical and educational perspectives

St Anne’s College, Oxford
Wednesday 16 to Friday 18 December 2009 (lunchtime to lunchtime).

In recent years studies of the history of mathematics have turned increasing attention to the mathematical experiences of ordinary people and to the teaching, learning and using of mathematics which takes place outside elite contexts and away from individuals who might ordinarily identify themselves as mathematicians. At the same time a focus exists in the educational world on the key skill of numeracy, its nature and its acquisition. Philosophers of mathematics have long been interested in the nature of our understanding of numbers and numerical operations and the nature of basic arithmetical knowledge.

This conference seeks to bring together these different approaches to numeracy, in order to share insights about what numeracy is, how we can recognise it (or its absence), how it relates to other cognitive capacities and other fundamental questions concerning basic numerical abilities. It will also provide a forum for the discussion of detailed case studies from the different realms of history, philosophy, and education, which will, it is hoped, prove mutually stimulating and fruitful for new interactions between these fields.
Novel and/or interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcomed, and we can accept pertinent studies based on any historical period or geographical region.

Confirmed invited speakers:
Philosophy: Marcus Giaquinto (University College, London); Stephen Laurence (University of Sheffield)
History: Natasha Glaisyer (York University); Jane Wess (Science Museum, London); Kathryn James (Yale)
Education: Terezinha Nunes (University of Oxford); Tom Roper (University of Leeds)

The cost will be £100, and will include two nights’ B&B accommodation at St Anne’s College, and attendance at the conference dinner on the 17th (a reduced rate of £50 will apply to students and to those who do not require overnight accommodation).

To propose a paper for consideration please send the title and abstract (approximately 200 words), together with your name and affiliation, in the body of an email to the address below. The deadline for the receipt of proposals is 31 July; every effort will be made to make decisions by 15 September. Speaking slots will be of 30 minutes, including time for questions.

Non-speaking delegates are also very welcome: to reserve a place please email the address below.

Organiser:
Dr Benjamin Wardhaugh
All Souls College
Oxford OX1 4AL
UK
benjamin.wardhaugh@all-souls.ox.ac.uk

Euroscience Open Forum, Turin, 2010

March 18, 2009 in Events, News by Alice Jenkins | 0

The European Science Open Forum will be held in Turin, Italy, 2-7 June 2010. It’s a large, very international meeting of scientists, journalists, policy makers and members of the public. The call for proposals emphasises interdisciplinary research and includes strands on science and language and science and culture. The deadline for proposals is June 15, 2009. You can read about the conference themes here, and the call for proposals is here.

BSLS 2009 programme now available

January 21, 2009 in 2009 Conference, Events, News, Society information by Stuart Robertson | 0

A provisional programme for our March 2009 conference at the University of Reading is now available along with information for delegates to register and book accommodation.

Darwin in the Literary World (public lecture)

January 15, 2009 in Events by John Holmes | 0

Rebecca Stott
Darwin in the Literary World – one of six of the annual Cambridge Darwin Lecture Series
Lady Mitchell Hall, West Road, at 5.30-6.30 on Friday 6th Feb

Within months of Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species, novelists, poets and artists began to turn Darwin’s ideas into art. That they have continued to do so up to the present day is a testimony to the imaginative reach of Darwin’s ideas as well as to the extent to which they transformed ways of seeing. Darwinism can be seen running through some of the late nineteenth century’s most richly imaginative prose and poetry including Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr Moreau and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But where nineteenth-century writers may have seen hybrid monsters, degeneration and extinction, Darwinism has come to have new meanings for each subsequent generation of writers and artists. Novelist and academic Rebecca Stott will show this perpetual re-making and ‘making new’ of Darwin’s ideas by taking a literary journey through late nineteenth-century fiction, to the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Ted Hughes and Ruth Padel and to the contemporary novels of Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt to show that writers have not just re-used Darwin’s ideas but have translated, adapted and extended them in fascinating ways.

Biography

Rebecca Stott is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich where she teaches both creative writing and nineteenth-century literature. As an academic she is the author of a number of books and articles about nineteenth-century poets such as Tennyson (1996) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2003), as well as books on the cross-fertilisations of literature and science such as The Fabrication of the Late Nineteenth-Century Femme Fatale (1996) and Oyster (2003). In 2003 she published Darwin and the Barnacle (Faber, 2003) a novelistic study of the eight years Darwin spent dissecting barnacles which received considerable acclaim and reached a wide readership. As a novelist she is the author of Ghostwalk (2003), a historical thriller and ghost story about Isaac Newton’s alchemy set in seventeenth-century Cambridge, which was shortlisted for two literary awards and has been translated into fifteen different languages including Mandarin and Russian. Her second novel, The Coral Thief (2009), a love story set in post-Napoleonic Paris in which a group Lamarkian savants stage an audacious theft from a museum in the Jardin des Plantes in 1815, will be published in August 2009. Her next academic book, Speculators: Poets and Philosophers of Evolution, a study of the migration of evolutionary ideas across Europe pre-Darwin, will be published in 2010 by Chicago University Press.

Art and Science Now: The Two Cultures in Question

December 19, 2008 in Events, News by Alice Jenkins | 0

On 7 May 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture in Cambridge. His influential and controversial address on the subject of ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ critiqued an increasing fissure between ‘literary intellectuals’ and ‘natural scientists’.

The London Consortium is bringing together the Science Museum, Tate Modern and Birkbeck, University of London, in a three-day conference to mark fifty years of the two cultures. Divided into two more specialised academic events and a more public occasion, the conference will consider whether Snow’s critique has been addressed by the increase in multi-disciplinary work and research and the emergence of new cultural forms. Or have the distinctions between and within the two cultures become further entrenched? How have the terms of the debate changed?

Thursday 22nd January, Birkbeck, University of London. Room B01, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London. 9.30am-5.30pm.

A day of academic papers from leading and emerging scholars in the field.
Keynote address: Professor Patricia Waugh (University of Durham).
Please contact Laura Salisbury to book a place: l.salisbury@bbk.ac.uk

Friday 23rd January, Dana Centre, Science Museum, Exhibition Rd, London. 9.30am-5.30pm.

A day of academic papers from leading and emerging scholars in the field.
Plenary papers:
Professor George Rousseau (Oxford University)
Dr Robert Bud (Science Museum)
Professor John Dupré (Exeter University)
To book a place, go to:

http://www.danacentre.org.uk/events/2009/01/23/460

Saturday 24th January, Tate Modern, Bankside, London. 10.30am-5.30pm.

A day of public lectures from renowned figures in the field.
Gillian Beer
Ben Goldacre
Anthony Grayling
Jonathan Miller
Alan Sokal
Book tickets at:

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/16580.htm

Darwin Festival 2009

November 28, 2008 in Events, News by Alice Jenkins | 0

Booking for the Darwin Festival in Cambridge, 5-10 July 2009, is now open. Among events that may be of interest to BSLS members:

Wednesday July 8th
A.S. Byatt in conversation with Professor Gillian Beer
and
Ian McEwan in conversation with Professor David Amigoni

Wednesday July 8th and Thursday July 9th
Sessions on Darwin on stage, in poetry, in the visual arts, and in music

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