Themed Issue Now Available: Victorian Science and Visual Culture
The latest special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture is now available online on the topic of ‘Victorian Science and Visual Culture’. This new issue contains the following articles:

Victorian science and popular visual culture FREE ACCESS
Bernard Lightman

Virtual reality and subjective responses: Narrating the search for the Franklin expedition through Robert Burford’s panorama
Laurie Garrison

Peopling the landscape: Showmen, displayed peoples and travel illustration in nineteenth-century Britain
Sadiah Qureshi

Illuminating illusions, or, the Victorian art of seeing things
Iwan Rhys Morus

The secret life of plants: Visualizing vegetative movement, 1880–1903
Oliver Gaycken

Transport phenomena: Space and visibility in Victorian physics
Simon Schaffer

Book Reviews, including

Victorian Glassworlds: Glass culture and the imagination 1830-1880
John Plunkett

Performing illusions: cinema, special effects and the virtual actor
Stephen Bottomore

Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910: vernacular modernity in France
Stephen Bottomore

9:30-17:00, 25 April 2012

Many people look suspiciously at science in fictional media and may ask themselves: Why don’t the creators of fiction ever talk to real scientists? In fact, those who write novels, craft television scripts, create movies, and produce stage plays do speak with scientists on a regular basis. This workshop explores how science provides challenges and opportunities for the creators of fiction. By bringing together leading entertainment professionals, novelists, arts scholars, and scientists the workshop will forge new relationships between the scientific community and the arts/entertainment community. One goal of the workshop is to begin discussions about creating a “Science and Entertainment” collaboration programme in the UK equivalent to the Science and Entertainment Exchange run by the National Academy of Sciences in the US.

http://www.salford.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/fees-and-funding/ahrc-studentships/doctoral-award-in-english

http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk/vacancies/index.cfm?fuseaction=vacancies.furtherdetails&vacancy_ref=3015150

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

Researching Literature and Science: A Roundtable

Professor Nick Battey (Head of Environmental Biology, University of Reading), Dr John Holmes, Dr Andrew Mangham, Dr Ulrika Maude, and Dr Stephen Thomson (English Literature, University of Reading)

Monday 5th December, 6 p.m., Humanities and Social Sciences building G74

No There There: The Infinitesimal Sublime in Victorian Poetry and Physics

Professor Herbert Tucker (John C. Coleman Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature, University of Virginia)

Wednesday 14th December, 5 p.m. Humanities and Social Sciences building 125

All welcome. Please email John Holmes (j.r.holmes@reading.ac.uk) for further details.

The programme for the next meeting of the University of London Interdisciplinary Discussion Group has now been finalised. Details are below and can also be found on our website. http://londoninterdisciplinarydiscussiongroup.wordpress.com/ Please email Susie Christensen (susie.christensen@kcl.ac.uk) if you would like to be added to the mailing list for this group.

Monday 23^rd January 2012, 5-7pm in K3.11 Raked Lecture Theatre, King’s College London, King’s Building, Strand Campus, Strand, London

On 23^rd January we will meet for the third time to discuss the topic of language. Our three speakers will address this topic from their respective disciplinary and professional backgrounds.  Each speaker will present for 20 minutes and then there will be an hour for questions and general discussion on this topic both in relation to the papers presented and with regards to the work of others present. This will also be a chance to reflect on interdisciplinarity in general and how the combination of these three papers enriches our understanding of the topic ‘language’

Programme

Laura Salisbury, Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College and RCUK Fellow in Science, Technology and Culture

Oiwi Parker Jones, Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL and at Wolfson College, Oxford

Helena Ballard, Teacher of the Deaf and associate of Life and Deaf

More Information on the speakers

Helena Ballard

Helena Ballard is an Advisory Teacher of the Deaf in Greenwich. Much of her current focus is on work with families who have newly diagnosed babies and small children, although she also goes into mainstream schools to support hearing impaired children and the staff who work with them.   A French graduate and lover of music, she came late to the field of deafness and to British Sign Language, both of which she finds fascinating.  Life and Deaf has been an important and stimulating addition for the past five years.

Life and Deaf started in a secondary mainstream unit for deaf students in Greenwich and came from a poetry project school-wide.  Working with specialist Speech and Language Therapists, Jane Thomas and Katie Martin, the deaf students  explored their identities through the medium of poetry, producing such powerful and rich work that a beautifully illustrated book of their poems was produced, accompanied by a DVD of the young poets speaking or signing their poetry. The aims of the project included the exploration of the beauty of language but also its power in allowing access to difficult or unexplored emotions which might affect mental health.  At a launch subsequently it became apparent that the students, their friends and families were so motivated and positively affected by the whole process that there were lasting and important benefits.  As a result the Life and Deaf Association was formed and the project was rolled out nationwide, with a web-site, a workbook to encourage wider participation and many other activities.  Life and Deaf 2 will culminate in a launch on the South Bank in March 2012.

She will be discussing he work teaching deaf children and Life and Deaf, and what these two things contribute to our understanding of language.

Oiwi Parker Jones

Oiwi Parker Jones is a linguist and neuroscientist whose research focuses on models of language in healthy and damaged brains, particularly in bilingual populations. He is particularly interested in (1) how multiple languages are represented in a single brain and (2) how bilinguals recover each language after brain damage due to cancer or stroke. His research uses a variety of methods, including anatomical and functional neuroimaging and dynamic network-based modelling. Other areas of research include the neuroscience of reading and sign-language, as well as topics in general linguistics, such as language documentation and activism (especially of endangered and Eastern Polynesian languages).”

He will be talking about his various investigations into language.

Laura Salisbury

Laura Salisbury is author of Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950). She has published a number of essays on aphasia and literary modernism and her major current research project is a book-length study of the relationship between modernism, modernity, and early twentieth-century neuroscientific conceptions of language. Other forthcoming work includes co-editing a volume called Kittler Now (Polity), co-editing a special issue of Medical Humanities on the topic of ‘Beckett and the Brain’, and writing a chapter on narratives of the brain in contemporary British Fiction for The Decades Project: International Perspectives on Contemporary British Fiction (Continuum).

She will talk about these aspects of her work in relation to the topic of language.