This one day workshop, aimed particularly at postgraduates and early career
researchers, introduces and explores historiographical and methodological
issues unique to the history of alchemy and chemistry. We will investigate
the practical challenges of researching chemistry over different periods,
from pre-modern matter theories and artisanal practices, to the shaping of
chemistry as a formal discipline in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and the increasing permeability of chemistry’s boundaries with
other disciplines, including physics and the biosciences, in modern times.
Participation is welcomed both from scholars already working on related
topics, and those interested in exploring points of intersection between
the history of chemistry and their own research.

Discussion will be framed by presentations from junior and established
scholars, including:

• Hasok Chang (University College London), ‘Why has chemistry become
  unfashionable for historians of science?’
• Jennifer Rampling (University of Cambridge), ‘Interpreting alchemy: text,
  image, and practice.’
• Karin Ekholm (Indiana University, Bloomington), ‘Some problems in the
  history of seventeenth-century chemistry.’
• John Perkins (Oxford Brookes University), ‘Searching for chemists in
  eighteenth-century France.’
• Pieter Thyssen (Catholic University of Leuven), ‘The Replication Method in
  the history of chemistry: resolving a nineteenth-century priority dispute.’
• Viviane Quirke (Oxford Brookes University), ‘Chemistry, the pharmaceutical
  industry, and medicine in the twentieth century: drugs as “boundary
  objects.”‘

Lunch is provided. There is no charge for attendance, but registration is
required. Assistance is available towards the cost of travel and
accommodation. Please email Jennifer Rampling for further
details, and to register.

Sponsored by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC).
For more information on SHAC, including details of the Society’s award
scheme for junior scholars, see www.ambix.org.

The workshop immediately follows the BSHS Postgraduate Conference in
Cambridge (5-7 January).

Friday 12 June 2009 (7th week), 2pm.

Jean-François Peyret (founder and director of the Tf2 theatre company, Paris), speaking about Les Variations Darwin.

Peyret’s work has included productions such as Les Variations Darwin, Galileo, and Le Cas de Sophie K, all of which involved collaborations with scientists.

Further details about the seminar are to be found at:

http://oxford-lit-and-science.blogspot.com/

The Editor-in-Chief, Martin Willis, would be glad to receive reviews and review queries by email to mwillis@glam.ac.uk

The JLS can be accessed at www.literatureandscience.research.glam.ac.uk/journal/

The Arts-Science Encounters are a series of talks bringing together researchers from across the University´s five faculties and recognised external speakers. The topics are broad ranging, including speakers from more than twenty disciplines, ranging from Chemistry, Fashion Design, Literature and Law, to Music, Neuroscience and Physics. Guest speakers and soloists include Darwin’s great-great grand-daughter Ruth Padel, former Lindsay Quartet cellist Bernard Gregor-Smith, and renowned science writers Richard Holmes and Denis Noble. The talks are free and open to the general public and are pitched at non-specialists.

Details of the programme are available here.

8 May 2009 at Research Institute for the Humanities, Keele University

“As little more than an infant, he was walking through a graveyard with his sister, Mary, ten years his senior, and reading the epitaphs on the universally belauded dead — for he was a precocious reader, who, it is said, ’knew his letters before he could talk’. As he came away, he turned to his sister and asked: ’Mary, where are the naughty people buried?’ This, we may be sure, though a joke to the reader, was not uttered as a joke by the small child” — Robert Lynd on Charles Lamb

For the biennial BARS Early Careers and Postgraduate Conference for 2009 we invite papers on lives and afterlives in the Romantic period. In particular, we are interested in biography and biographical criticism, including the receptions and depictions of both major and minor writers and artists who lived between c.1770 and 1835. We are also interested in multidisciplinary conversations about the pedagogical issues associated with our theme, as well as reflections on archival and methodological problems and solutions. We will have a roundtable discussion on Teaching Romanticism, chaired by Professor Sharon Ruston, as well as a roundtable panel on Archival Research, a Q&A session on Academic Publishing, and a Keynote address by Professor David Amigoni.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• The production and reception of Collected Works
• Biographies, book history & periodical culture
• The Death of the Author: biographical criticism after Theory
• Biographical dictionaries & anecdotes
• “Biofictions” (e.g. Peter Ackroyd’s Blake)
• Literature: Life: Science
• Reception histories of major/minor authors
• Biographies and the new media
• Genius & Celebrity
• Biographies after Johnson and Boswell
• Classical precedents
• Morality, censorship and life writing
• Lives and visual art / Lives on stage
• Published and unpublished letters
• Autobiographical writing & memoirs
• Epitaphs & tourist industries

Each paper will last 20 minutes. Please send abstracts of around 200 words to Dr. Daniel Cook. We especially welcome panel proposals. In this instance send us a panel title, a list of three or four speakers and a chair (if appropriate), titles of the papers, and abstracts.

Deadline for abstracts: 19th March 2009

Organisers: Dr. Daniel Cook (Keele), Amber Kay Regis (Keele) & Matthew Sangster (Royal Holloway)

The relationship between science and the public has provided fruitful material for analysis from a range of academic disciplines, and an important area of policy and practice, in recent years. Studies and experience have revealed a startling complexity, past and present, in science communication, a range of channels (formal, informal, fictional) through which dialogue and debate takes place, and a wide variety of participants in these interactions. Science itself has been reconceptualised, and the complexity of science as a discourse, as practice and as a form of life raises many questions. Science has long been seen as a quest for certainty, even if that goal is unachievable, but our interactions with and examinations of science often reveal, and are characterised by, many uncertainties: what are we encountering, describing and making when we examine science in its many forms? At the same time as this critical examination of the interface between science and the public has been taking place, a dramatic proliferation in modes and amounts of public engagement with science occurred. Science museums, outreach work and edutainment for younger people have achieved new prominence while history of science and popular science texts flourish in the market. This conference will bring together academics and practitioners who have an interest in the intersection of science and non-science, be that in contemporary, past or future societies, to confront and discuss the uncertainties, and certainties, of science and the public.

Possible topics may include:

• Scientific controversies in the media
• Experts and expertise in public
• The representation of science in fiction
• Public expectations of science and technology
• Historical analysis of the relationship between science and the public
• The role of museums, outreach and edutainment
• Science communication in theory and practice
• The role of news and entertainment media (including the internet)
• The construction of interdisciplinary projects and frameworks

Keynote Speakers (confirmed):

Dr Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor of Clare College, University of Cambridge
Professor Steve Fuller, Sociology, Warwick University

Abstract submission

Individual paper proposals for a 20 minutes presentation should be submitted by abstract (no longer than 300 words) to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com by 14^th February 2009. Please include full contact details (name, affiliation, email) of all authors and four keywords.

Panel submission

The conference organizers also encourage full panel submissions and roundtable sessions. Panel proposals should include a panel abstract and individual abstracts for each of the papers on the panel as well as contact information (name, affiliation, email) of the presider (moderator) and all panel members. Roundtable proposals should be a single abstract with names and contact information for all presenters.

Conference Fee

In line with previous years the conference fee is expected to be in the region of £50 with concessions for students.

All submissions should be emailed to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com by 14th February 2008. Please send enquires to this address as well.

Registration costs £35 (£40 on the day); concessions £20. Because of limited capacity early registration is advised. Registration forms and further details are available from the Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe Project Office: RBAE@clarehall.cam.ac.uk.

Today the sciences are linked to society through many different channels of
communication. The public interfaces with science during controversies that
involve scientists as well as journalists, politicians and the citizenry as
a whole. This interdisciplinary conference brings together diverse strands
of academia in order to consider science, technology and medicine as they
intersect with non-professional cultures in both contemporary and historical
settings.

The deadline for registration is Saturday 14 June.

For registration details and further information, see the conference
website, or email scienceandpublic@googlemail.com

Tuesday 19 February, 7 pm

In the next in an occasional series of lectures by authors of successful books in the history of science, Philip Ball will talk about his book, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science. Philip Ball has been awarded the Dingle Prize (2007) by the British Society for the History of Science and is described in The Sunday Times as ‘one of our most versatile and gripping science writers.’