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Cfp: ‘Booms’ of Popular Science Publishing

March 31, 2010 in Events, Related Events by Alice Jenkins | No comments

Dr Hauke Riesch and Dr Alice Bell are seeking contributions for a one-day symposium on 20th century popular science: the morning devoted to the apparent post-Einstein boom in popular science publishing, the afternoon considering post-Hawking works.

The event is to be held at Imperial College London on 31st March, 2010. It will comprise of a series of extended 30 minute talks, plus time for discussion.

The mention of Einstein and Hawking should not suggest an interest purely in the popularisation of physics, nor should it imply a focus on biographical details of their lives, celebrity-science, or challenges of relaying especially abstract ideas in text. Papers might explore the impact of other iconic scientists, popular science audiences, marginal scientists publishing through popular texts, the role of journalists and science-writers and/or the role played by publishers, reviewers and bookselling contexts. We should also note that we welcome papers which reflection on both the background context and long-term consequences of 20th century popular science. Papers on 19th or 21st century popular science publishing are
still of interest, as long as they speak to themes raised by a 20th century focus.

The broad range of topics potential papers might discuss include (but
are not limited to):

* Relationships between scientists and their publics.
* Celebrity, public intellectuals and popular science authorship.
* Marketing and the role of consumer culture.
* Issues of culture and social class.
* Writing for children.
* Implied epistemologies.
* Publishing processes and cultures.
* Outsider-scientist writers.
* Science and Religion.
* The audiences of popular science.
* Popular science’s impact on and reflection of science policy issues.
* Humour and comedy in science writing.
* Wonder and the sublime.
* Metaphor.
* Literary renderings of mathematics.
* Illustrations, diagrams, graphics and design.

Potential contributors should email a 500 word abstract (including, if necessary, bibliography) along with a 150 word biography to popularsciencebooms@googlemail.com by 11th December, 2009.

Tags: Events, Graduate Students news, Public Understanding, Related Events

SHAC Workshop: History of Alchemy and Chemistry

January 5, 2010 in Events, Other Organisations, Related Events by Stuart Robertson | No comments

Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge

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).

Tags: Events, News, Related Events

Nature and the Long Nineteenth Century conference

December 14, 2009 in Events, Related Events by Alice Jenkins | No comments

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!

Nature and the long nineteenth century is a one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference exploring intersections of the natural world with nineteenth-century literature and culture.

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?

For more information and to register for the conference, please visit the conference website.

Closing date for registration: 7 January 2010.

Conference organisers:

Claire McKechnie, University of Edinburgh and Dr Emily Alder, Edinburgh Napier University.

Please direct enquiries to natureconference@ed.ac.uk.

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

CFP: (Dis)Entangling Darwin

August 17, 2009 in Events, News, Related Events by John Holmes | No comments

(Dis)Entangling Darwin: Cross-Disciplinary Reflections
University of Porto, Portugal

2009 marks the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth (12 February 1809) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his groundbreaking On the Origin of Species (24 November 1859). The University of Porto CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies) is holding a special conference to honour Charles Darwin’s enduring legacy, and examine how his ideas remain central to contemporary research, within and beyond the biological sciences, echoing the global celebrations of his life and work, and his impact across the disciplines.

Keynote speakers include David Amigoni (Keele University, UK) and John Van Wyhe (Cambridge University, UK). Special guest speakers include: Ana Leonor Pereira – Historian, History and Sociology of Science and Culture/Specialist in the History of Darwinism in Portugal (UC); Filipe Furtado – Specialist in English Cultural Studies and in Victorian politics, aesthetics, philosophy and scientific thought, author of various articles on Darwin and Darwinism. (FCSH-UNL); João Cabral – Historian and Botanist. Specialist in Darwin’s contributions to nineteenth-century botanical studies (FCUP); Jorge Vieira – Biologist/Molecular Evolution/IBMC (Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology); Maria Teresa Malafaia – Specialist in English/Victorian Studies/Social Darwinism (UL); Nuno Ferrand – Biologist. CIBIO coordinator (Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources – UP); Octávio Mateus – Biologist and Paleontologist (specialist in Dinosaurs. FCT-UNL/Museum of Lourinhã).

The conference title draws inspiration from the notable conclusion of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In it he writes:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us [...] There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Darwin’s descriptions rely on the formulation of incredibly complex and visual pictures, often portrayed in a series of “imaginary illustrations” which combine colourful arrangements of both facts and suppositions. The reader is constantly involved in a visual perceptual chaos of entanglements and webbed relationships, performances and theatricalities, exhibiting the way in which the human, animal and natural worlds are mutually imbricated. This conference wishes to contribute to the ongoing disentanglement of Darwin’s legacy, which remains as controversial to twenty-first century critics as it was to Darwin’s contemporaries. There are still many missing links and inherent contradictions that continue to attract growing, interdisciplinary attention from a wide range of specialisms. All in all, the re-drawing of physical and psychological frontiers demanded by evolutionary theory in an attempt to define what is meant by human nature is still very much in progress, validating at the same time extraordinary opportunities for further research.

We welcome 20-minute papers in English dealing with all aspects of Darwin’s legacy, from science to literature and the social sciences, the visual arts, religion, philosophy, politics and cultural relations. Please include the following information with your proposal: the full title of your paper; a 250-300 word abstract; your name, postal address and e-mail address; your institutional affiliation and position; any audiovisual requirements you may have. The deadline for proposals is 15 October 2009. Participants will be notified of acceptance no later than 31 October 2009.

Inquiries and proposals should be sent to the following e-mail: saragsilva@hotmail.com Conference fee: 60,00 ? (includes coffee breaks and Friday lunch). Attendance is free for UP students. OPTIONAL – Conference Dinner (Friday): 20 ? Please check the Porto Faculty of Letters/Sigarra website for updates. Additional Information Porto http://www.travel-in-portugal.com/Porto/ Airport http://www.ana.pt/portal/page/portal/ANA/AEROPORTO_PORTO/ Organising Committee Fátima Vieira Jorge Bastos da Silva Sara Graça da Silva

‘ “Romantic Biographies” c.1770-1835’ May 2009

March 4, 2009 in News, Other Organisations, Related Events by Stuart Robertson | No comments

“Romantic Biographies”: Writing Lives and Afterlives, c.1770-1835
The Early Careers and Postgraduate Conference for The British Association for Romantic Studies

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)

CFP: ‘Phobia’ Constructing the Phenomenology of Chronic Fear, 1789 to the Present

October 2, 2008 in Events, News, Related Events by Stuart Robertson | No comments

‘Phobia’ Constructing the Phenomenology of Chronic Fear, 1789 to the Present

Glamorgan Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science
University of Glamorgan | The ATRiuM Campus Cardiff
8-9 May 2009

Keynote Speakers: Laura Otis (Emory University) | Andrew Thacker (De Montfort University)

CALL FOR PAPERS

The history of phobias as disease entities is intimately connected to the phenomenology of modernity. Whereas the emergence of spatial phobias such as agoraphobia (Carl Otto Westphal, 1871) and claustrophobia (Benjamin Ball, 1879) coincided with growing urbanisation and the development of the modern metropolis, Sigmund Freud’s modern subject theory situated phobia at the heart of his psychoanalytical practice (‘Little Hans’, Totem and Taboo, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety). The fin de siècle was rife with cultural and social fears about the present and the future, and the twentieth century—with its two global conflicts, its natural disasters and the threat of terrorism—has ushered in a period of postmodern panic. Fear and anxiety are omnipresent in the modern age. But when, how and why does fear become chronic, morbid or abnormal? And in what ways has fear been conceptualised by medical practitioners, cultural theorists and artists?

This interdisciplinary conference looks at the different ways in which writers, artists, historians, art historians, cultural and human geographers, scientists and medical practitioners have constructed, represented and theorised phobia and chronic fear.

We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of phobias and anxiety disorders in the period from 1789 to the present. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged. Topics may include but are not limited to:

spatial phobias
biophobias
social phobias
phobia and the Gothic
the fin de siècle
phobia, modernisation and modernity
phobia and psychoanalysis
phobia and cultural geography
fear of science and technology
phobia, the senses and physical sensations
phobophobia

Abstracts of 300 words and a short CV should be sent to Dr Vike Martina Plock and Dr Martin Willis via email at rclas@glam.ac.uk by 1 December 2008. Proposals for panels (comprising three speakers) are also welcome—please submit the title and a brief description of the panel as well as abstracts for the individual papers.

Tags: CFP

Conference CFP – Global Risk

September 3, 2008 in Related Events by Martin Willis | No comments

CALL FOR PAPERS: Literature, Art and Culture in an Age of Global Risk

An international, Interdisciplinary Conference

Cardiff University, UK
Thursday 2*Friday 3 July 2009

Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Imre Szemán (McMaster University, Canada)
Dr Charlie Gere (Lancaster University, UK)

What are the cultural implications of living under conditions of global, manufactured risk?

In the twentieth century, the possibility arose for the first time that a crisis of planetary proportions might result from human activities. By the early decades of the century, global economic and financial interdependence was such that a crisis unfolding in one location could radiate outwards to destabilize the entire socio-economic world-system. Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the risk of pandemic upheaval has been heightened by an array of phenomena: the expansion and acceleration of media and telecommunications networks; the integration of financial markets and the instantaneous ramification of market fluctuations via programme trading; nuclear proliferation; international terrorism; rapid population growth; unsustainable consumption of natural resources; overload of electricity grids, leading to cascading power failures; pollution of the ecosphere and resulting climate change; computer viruses and *cyber-warfare*; genetic engineering; cloning; nanotechnology; artificial intelligence; bioweaponry; the emergence and rapid spread of new strains of infectious disease; and the development of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Scholars speak of *systemic risk* (Anthony Giddens), *simultaneous crisis formation* (David Harvey), a *general disaster* (Brian Massumi), *worst imaginable accidents* (Ulrich Beck), *total risk of catastrophe* (François Ewald), *global* or *integral* accidents (Paul Virilio), *global catastrophic risks* (Nick Bostrom and Milan *irkovi*), and *modernist events* * *events which not only could not possibly have occurred before the twentieth century but the nature, scope, and implications of which no prior age could even have imagined* (Hayden White).

Such occurrences hover indeterminably somewhere between the possible, the probable, and the inevitable. This conference will explore how writers, artists, filmmakers, dramatists, philosophers, and critical and cultural theorists have responded to the prospect and reality of global crisis. Moreover, it will ask how the methodologies of textual and cultural criticism might offer new insights into our age of global risk.

Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

-Notions of futurity, messianism, and the à venir (*to come*)
-Modernism and the first era of globalization
-Figurations of the contemporary, postmodern, or technological sublime
-The alteration and/or realization of textual meanings in the wake of catastrophic events
-Connections between conditions of global risk and the aesthetic or intellectual *risks* taken by experimental artists and thinkers
-Disaster films
-Ecocriticism and climate change
-Future ruins
-The fate of the archive
-*Nuclear Criticism* and its possible revival post-9/11
-(Post-)apocalyptic visions
-Cyberculture and utopian/dystopian futures
-The cultural implications of Kondratiev waves and world-systems theory

Please send 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers to the organizer, Dr Paul Crosthwaite, at globalrisk@cardiff.ac.uk by Monday 22 December 2008. Proposals for three-person panels are also welcome; please send a brief description of the panel along with abstracts for the individual papers.

Updates will appear on the conference web site: http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/globalrisk

Tags: CFP

Darwin, Tennyson and their readers conference

May 12, 2008 in Related Events by Alice Jenkins | No comments

DARWIN, TENNYSON and their READERS: A Bicentenary Celebration, 1809 – 2009
A One-Day Conference to be held in Cambridge,
Saturday 17th October 2009, 10am – 6pm.

Plenary Speakers:

Gillian Beer, George Levine
Offers of Short Papers (20 minutes long) are invited.

Please contact: Valerie Purton, Anglia Ruskin University (Valerie.Purton@anglia.ac.uk) by 1st October, 2008.

2009 will mark the bicentenary of the births of both Alfred Tennyson and Charles Darwin. Our one-day conference will celebrate this event by exploring the interaction of literature and science in the Victorian period, mining the rich vein of research opened up by Professor Dame Gillian Beer in Darwin’s Plots (1983) and continued by Professor George Levine in Darwin and the Novelists (1988). Professors Beer and Levine will both present plenary papers at the conference, outlining their latest thinking and building on the central insight that ‘the cultural traffic ran both ways’. Short papers are therefore invited, exploring the links not only between Tennyson and Darwin, but more generally between the writings of nineteenth century scientists and of nineteenth century poets or novelists – evidence that they were reading each other. A paper on Thomas Huxley’s reading of Tennyson would be especially welcomed; some more obvious subjects might be: George Eliot’s reading of Darwin; Darwin and Myth; Darwin reading Dickens; ‘Optimistic Materialism’ – in the light of George Levine’s latest book, Darwin Loves You (2007); ‘Condition of England novels and Evolutionary Theory: Kingsley, Disraeli and Darwin’; ‘Tennyson and Browning: two responses to evolutionary debates’; ‘Growing Younger with the Years: the reputations of Tennyson and Darwin reconsidered’; or ‘A Passion for Fabulation: Darwin, Tennyson and Autobiography’.

Proposals for papers, including a 300-word summary, should be sent to:

Dr Valerie Purton
Department of English
Anglia Ruskin University
East Road
Cambridge
CB1 1PT
U.K
Email: Valerie.Purton@anglia.ac.uk

Tags: CFP

The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures

February 29, 2008 in Related Events by Alice Jenkins | No comments

St Mary’s College, Durham 4-6 April

Programme

Friday 4 April

15.00-17.00: Registration

Section One: The Anglophone World

17.30-18.30 David Amigoni (Keele): Down the Darwinian Line(s): Inherited Characteristics in Biology, Literature and Culture

*20.00-21.00 A. S. Byatt and Patricia Waugh (Durham): Darwinian Fictions (Elvet Riverside 140)
This event is open to the public – admission free.

Saturday 5 April

09.30-11.00 Anna Barton (Keele): An Evolutionist to his Son: Tennyson, Darwin and the Poetry of Inheritance
John Holmes (Reading): Victorian Evolutionary Criticism and the Pitfalls of Consilience

11.30-13.00 Jon Adams (London): Value Judgements and Functional Roles: Carroll’s Quarrel With Pinker
Wendy Wheeler (London): The Book of Nature and the Semiosic Tree of Life: Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Literature

Section Two: The Francophone World

14.30-16.00 Christopher Lloyd (Durham): Men, Monkeys, and Monsters: the Evolution of Popular Fiction from the Fin-de-siècle to the Present

Louise Lyle (Sheffield): The Evolution of Humanity in Vercors’s ” Les animaux dénaturés” and Romain Gary’s “Les racines du ciel”

16.30-17.15 Douglas Morrey (Warwick): Houellebecq, Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology

18.00-19.00 David Baguley (Durham/UWO): Zola and Darwin: A Reassessment

Sunday 6 April

Section Three: The Germanophone World

09.00-10.00 John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt): Nietzsche and Darwin: Life as Literature, Literature as Life

10.30-12.00 David Midgley (Cambridge): The Reception of Bergson’s “L’évolution créatrice” in the German-Speaking World

Katja Mellmann (Munich): Evolutionary Psychology as Heuristic of Literary Studies

Crossovers

(tbc)

The Future

14.30-15.15 Alistair Brown (Durham): The E-Volutionary Novel: Darwinian Digital Narratives

Outlook

16.30-17.30 Elinor Shaffer (London): The Reception of Darwin in Europe

Conference site address:
St Mary’s College
University of Durham
Elvet Hill Road
GB-Durham DH1 3LR
Telephone (Reception) 0044 (0)191 334 5719

http://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/

Attendance fee including tea/coffee and lunch £100 (unwaged £55) Attendance fee including full board accommodation, tea/coffee, and lunch £200 (unwaged £155)

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