News

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.

So that readers of the BSLS website can readily trace the authors of BSLS book reviews, I have set up a new index of book reviews ordered by reviewer, to complement the existing indexes by author and date. You can find this index in the main menu down the side of this page, or by going to the reviews page itself.

John Holmes, Reviews Editor

George Levine, winner of the BSLS book prize for 2008, has written a review essay on Brian Boyd’s much discussed new book On the Origin of Stories, which was shortlisted for the BSLS book prize for 2009. To read his essay, click here.

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.

BSLS members may be interested in the National Humanities Center’s project ‘On the Human’, which is an online forum for humanities scholars and scientists to ’share their ideas and research’.  A number of eminent scholars in the literature and science field have published essays in the forum, including N. Katherine Hayles (‘Distributing/Disturbing the Chinese Room’) and Joseph Carroll (‘The Adaptive Function of Literature and the Other Arts’), and each is followed by substantial comments from other scholars.  On 21 June, the site will publish a new essay on ‘Late Darwin and the Problem of the Human’ by the Society’s President, Professor Dame Gillian Beer.

‘Such Total and Prodigious Alteration’ / ‘The Wounds May Be Again Bound Up’:

Readings and Representations of the Seventeenth Century

An academic conference to be held in Chetham’s Library, Manchester, 28th-29th January, 2011

During the restoration and eighteenth century, the civil war period was consistently represented as a traumatic break in the history of England and the British Isles, separating the institutionally and culturally modern Augustans from either the primitiveness or idealised simplicity of the earlier epoch. Today, much academic practice silently repeats the period’s self-representation as a century divided between pre and post civil war cultures, whether in research, job descriptions or in undergraduate survey courses. Among the effects of this division of labour is a tendency for the earlier ‘Renaissance’ decades to be privileged over the restoration, which is frequently treated as a poor relation to the eighteenth century.

This conference provides a forum for researchers in all disciplines whose work spans all or any part of the long seventeenth century. As our titular quotations from Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Swift’s sermon ‘On the Martyrdom of King Charles I’ suggest, we also encourage papers on subsequent imaginings of the period that have contributed to or contested the ways in which it is read today.

Concerns include but are not limited to:

• The comparative study of seventeenth-century writing, sciences, visual arts and music before, during and after the civil war period; their material and intellectual dissemination; their relationship to ideas of what constitutes the early modern and the restoration.
• Constructions of the seventeenth century from the restoration to the present;
• representations in literature, art, history and film; the cultural influence of the seventeenth century on subsequent periods.
• The role critical theory can play in our reading of the period and/or narratives of the long seventeenth century from within literary criticism and critical theory; e.g. Leavis and Eliot on the Metaphysical poets, Walter Benjamin on the baroque,Foucault on madness, Habermas on the public sphere.
• The study of non-canonical and marginalized texts and materials, and nationally comparative readings of the period.
• The representation and reception of pre-seventeenth-century culture during the seventeenth century; the place of the past in the period’s self-representations.

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words to James Smith (Manchester) and Joel Swann (Keele) by 15th October 2010: c17.conference@manchester.ac.uk. Further information:

http://www.chethams.org.uk/c17conference.html. Proposals from postgraduate students are particularly welcome and student attendance will be subsidised by the generous support of the Society for Renaissance Studies.

Professor Dame Gillian Beer, “Darwin and the Descent of Woman”

Respondent: Professor Juliet Mitchell
Chair: Professor Jim Secord
Weds 2 June 2010, 5.00pm to 6.30pm
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge
All Welcome: Free Entrance and a glass of wine 
Sponsored by the Centre for Gender Studies and the Darwin Correspondence Project

The BSLS book prize for the best book in the field of literature and science published in 2009 has been awarded to Leah Knight for Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (Ashgate).

Call for papers
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews “ Poetries and sciences in the 21st Century”

This is to invite proposals for contributions to a themed issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews on the topic of “Poetries and sciences in the 21st Century”, to be published as volume 37, number 2, June 2012.

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Call for papers

International Interdisciplinary Conference, 17-18 February 2011

Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease, Durham University, UK

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 July 2010

This conference will discuss the history of the relationship between aesthetics and medical understandings of the body. Today’s vogue for neurological accounts of artistic emotions has a long pedigree. Since G.S. Rousseau’s pioneering work underlined the importance of models of the nervous system in eighteenth-century aesthetics, the examination of physiological explanations in aesthetics has become a highly productive field of interdisciplinary research. Drawing on this background, the conference aims to illuminate the influence that different medical models of physiology and the nervous system have had on theories of aesthetic experience. How have aesthetic concepts (for instance, imagination or genius) be grounded medically? What effect did the shift from animal spirits to modern neurophysiology have on aesthetics?

This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars working in a wide range of fields, including not only the history of medicine but also in subjects such as art history, languages and musicology.

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There are about three weeks left before the deadline for the NEH Summer Institute to be held at Mystic Seaport (CT, USA) this summer, 21 June to 30 July 2010.

Entitled “The American Maritime People,” the institute will pay $4,500 to each participant to defray expenses; there are places available for faculty and graduate students alike.

Please refer to the institute website for information on the program, participant eligibility and the application process.

Public talk: Poems of Space

10^th November, 19:00-20:45, National Maritime Museum Lecture Theatre, £8

Renowned astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell explores the connections between poetry and science and her experience of compiling Dark Matter, an anthology of poems inspired by astronomy. Followed by a discussion with poet Kelley Swain (Darwin’s Microscope) and astronomer/writer Dr Pippa Goldschmidt.

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/visit/events/public-talk-poems-of-space/*/changeNav/false/from/2856

Tickets from the NMM Bookings Office: 020 8312 6608, bookings@nmm.ac.uk

The JLS has recently published its second issue, Vol.2, No.1. The issue contains
articles on:

• 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.

Application deadline: 15/11/2008

The PhD-Net “Internationalisation of Literature and Science since the Early Modern Period” is a bi-national PhD programme run collaboratively by King’s College London and the University of Stuttgart, which aims to forge interdisciplinary connections between various subjects in the Humanities (German Studies, English Studies, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and the Histories of Medicine, Science and Technology). Partner institutions in Germany include the German Literature Archive in Marbach and the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation.

An international research group will support and connect projects which address both inter- and trans-national tendencies within the Humanities. Projects will develop both theoretical models for the as yet under-researched area of internationalisation within the Humanities, as well as critically assess historical case studies from the early modern period onwards, which address the role of exchange movements and networks and the transfer of topics, practices and methods in literature and science. Of particular interest is the relevance of literature(s) for the internationalisation of the sciences, alongside critical reflections on the significance of the presentation and the mediality of knowledge (language, text, image) for its circulation, communication and implementation.

For further info, including application procedure, please click here or contact Ben Schofield (benedict.schofield@kcl.ac.uk).

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

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A symposium on Euclidean geometry in nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century British culture will be held in Cambridge, UK, 1-2 October 2009. The event will be highly interdisciplinary and easily accessible to non-
mathematicians. Speakers include Professors Dame Gillian Beer, Joan L.
Richards, Jeremy Gray, Marilyn Gaull, Linda Henderson and Robin Wilson. We aim to investigate the effects on British literature, art, and architecture of Euclidean geometry’s centrality and prestige in the education of Victorian elites, artisans and auto-didacts of both sexes.

The symposium will be held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), and is funded by the European Research Council. Anyone interested in Victorian literature and science, education, or mathematics are very welcome to attend. The regular fee is £20; a reduced rate is available. Please contact the conference organiser, a.jenkins_at_englit.arts.gla.ac.uk, if you would like to attend.

A one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference exploring intersections of the natural world with nineteenth-century literature
and culture, to be held at the University of Edinburgh, Saturday, 6 February 2010.
Keynote speakers: Dr Martin Willis, University of Glamorgan, Dr Christine Ferguson, University of Glasgow, Professor Nick Daly, University College Dublin.

In the twenty-first century, environmentalism and the impacts of climate change form a nexus of intense debates about relationship between human culture and the natural world. However, the centrality of the natural world to the nineteenth century imagination has long been acknowledged by scholars, way-marked by Lynn Merrill’s The Romance of Victorian Natural History (1989) for example, while Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002) demonstrates the relevance of nineteenth-century research to the modern world.

This conference probes the significance of nature to the long nineteenth century and to our study of its literature, history, science, art, and other media. How did the natural world influence people in the nineteenth century?and how did nineteenth-century culture shape attitudes to the natural world? Have twenty-first century questions over nature, climate, and the environment changed the way we view and study the cultural products of the nineteenth century, or offered new avenues for research, especially interdisciplinary research?

Possible topics could include but are not limited to:
Representations of nature in history, literature, drama, poetry, art, theatre Representations of, or human relationships with: oceans and the seaside, mountains and the countryside, rivers, lakes, gardens, working animals, pets Natural history, specimens, collecting, displaying Science and human or animal nature: hybridity, husbandry, eugenics; Darwinism and biology; Lyell and geology Climate change, environmentalism, eco-criticism, the ecotopia The natural world in romance, Gothic, the fantastic Natural horror, biological monstrosity and the limits of the human The (un)natural city, machine, media The (super)natural world: ghosts, spiritualism, Gothic Theoretical approaches to human and animal nature or the representation of nature.

Postgraduate and early-career researchers are invited to submit 300 word proposals for 20 minute papers or proposals for panels to natureconference@ed.ac.uk by 16 November 2009. .

Organisers: Claire McKechnie, University of Edinburgh and Dr Emily Alder, Edinburgh Napier University. Contact us at natureconference@ed.ac.uk.

We are grateful for the support of the British Association for Victorian Studies, the British Society for Literature and Science, and the Centre for Literature and Writing at Edinburgh Napier University.

Please note that the Darwin Tennyson and their Readers bicentenary conference takes place on Saturday 17th October 2009 not 17th September.

On Wednesday 8th July at 2 p.m. at the Cambridge Darwin Festival, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and John Holmes will be interviewing a number of contemporary writers about the impact of Darwin and his ideas on their work. Speakers will include the playwrights Craig Baxter and Peter Parnell and the poets Ruth Padel, John Barnie and Kelley Swain. For details of the event and how to register, go to 

http://www.darwin2009.cam.ac.uk/

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 13: Victorian Ecology

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, the journal of ASLE-UK (the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment), explores interdisciplinary interfaces between humans and the natural and built environment. Submissions are invited for our spring 2010 edition which will focus on ecological themes in Victorian Literature and Culture.

Submissions may focus on any literary or cultural figures, or literary genres, either in or related to the Victorian period or the nineteenth-century. Examples might include, but need not be limited to the following themes: Victorian literature and science, post-Romanticism, cultural criticism (e.g. Ruskin, Carlyle, Morris), Victorian gothic, the realist novel, evolutionary theory and/or the new physics, key scientific figures (Darwin, Wallace etc), the industrial or urban landscape, Victorian poetry, literature and ‘early green politics’. Articles that relate to nineteenth-century literature within other cultures, especially European cultures, will also be considered. While we do not specify any particular themes, articles should have a broad ecocritical flavour, be informed by ecocritical theory, and seek to establish, where appropriate, connections or divergences with contemporary ecological thinking.

Green Letters is a peer-reviewed journal. Please note that each article should be accompanied by a brief biographical note. Articles should be typed double spaced, with references in the MLA style and any substantial footnotes at the bottom of each page (a more detailed style sheet will be provided on acceptance). Manuscript length should be between 4000 and 6000 words. Eventual submissions should be made via email with a MS Word attachment of the document.

To have a submission considered please send an abstract (approximately 500 words) to GreenLetters@bathspa.ac.uk. The abstract should be sent as an anonymous attachment in Word document format along with a covering email giving your name, address and institutional affiliation. The deadline for abstracts is Monday 22 June. A decision as to which articles will be commissioned will be made in early July and the deadline for submissions will be Friday 29 January 2010.

Poetry and Science: The Case of Humphry Davy

Applications are invited for a fully-funded PhD award to study the manuscript and published poetry of the chemist Humphry Davy, 1778–1829. This collaborative award, to be supervised jointly by experts at the University of Salford and the Royal Institution of Great Britain (www.rigb.org), will involve the student spending one year based at the Royal Institution in London, transcribing Davy’s poetry and participating in the institution’s public-facing activities.

How to apply:

Application forms can be downloaded at:
http://www.salford.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/postgraduate-research/applying/. The closing date for applications is 26 June 2009.

Enquiries should be made to Professor Sharon Ruston, s.ruston@salford.ac.uk or on 0161 295 5071.

The Darwin Correspondence Project will award two prizes of £1000 each for the best student essays on science and religion that use materials from Darwin’s letters. The competition is open to students from all disciplines, nationalities, and stages of education. One prize will be awarded to a university or post-graduate student; the maximum length for these submissions is 8000 words. The other prize will be awarded to a school student; the maximum length for these submissions is 3000 words. The essay must be in English. The closing date for submissions is 1 May 2009.

Cultivating Empire: Exploration, Science and Literature

An Interdisciplinary Conference featuring the work and influence of Sir Joseph Banks

Lincoln, UK, 17-18 April 2009

Featured speakers: Richard Holmes (biographer of Shelley and Coleridge and
author of The Age of Wonder); G.S. Rousseau (historian of medicine: co-author
of Gout: the Patrician Malady); Stephen Daniels (geographer: biographer of
Humphry Repton); John Bonehill (art historian: co-author of William Hodges
1747-1797: The Art of Exploration); Anna Agnarsdottir (historian: editor of
Banks’s Iceland papers); Martin Davies (novelist: author of The Conjurer’s
Bird); David Robinson (historian of Banks and Lincolnshire); Neil Chambers
(Director of the Banks Archive and Editor of his Indian and Pacific
Correspondence).

This multidisciplinary conference will examine the intersections between the
local and the global–the English shire and the colonial shore– in the years
1750-1850. the conference has as its centre
Sir Joseph Banks but also aims more broadly to present critical work in the
following areas:

- the history of exploration and of colonial settlement (e.g. in Australiasia, the
South Pacific, Africa, India, the NW coast of America, the Poles, and in Britain
itself)
- the development of colonialism as a system (for instance, the application to a
global network of forms of administration and control pioneered on the English
country estate)
- the cultural impact of the exploration and settlement of previously-unknown
regions (e.g. in verbal and visual representations: art, theatre, poetry and
fiction, journalism, travel writing; and vis-a-vis Orientalism, Omai, Tahiti,
and India)
- natural philosophy in Britain and abroad (e.g. plant exchange, imperial botany,
geological mapping, imperial medicine, the Royal Society, Kew Gardens, Hooker)
agricultural improvement at home and in the colonies (e.g. Captain Bligh and the
breadfruit scheme, the import and export of crops and livestock, the Royal
Society of Arts)
- local history: the relationship of antiquarian study to the practice of natural
philosophy in the empire
- Sir Joseph Banks: any aspect of his life and work
archives and correspondence: the role of collections, letters and information
stores, then and now, in knowledge-production and staging empire
- the late eighteenth-century gentry as a class
- the exchange and cultural meanings of technologies and objects
- gender and sexuality in the fields of colonialism and exploration.

Submissions for 20 minute papers are invited from historians of science,
literary critics, geographers, students of local history, garden historians,
colonial critics and all others interested in the cultures of late eighteenth
and early nineteenth-century Britain. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent by email to tim.fulford@ntu.ac.uk by 20 February 2009.

Organisers: Neil Chambers, Sir Joseph Banks Archive, Nottingham Trent
University; Tim Fulford, Dept ELH, Nottingham Trent University; Ian Packer,
School of Humanities and Performing Arts, University of Lincoln; The Sir
Joseph Banks Society.