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.

CRASSH, University of Cambridge

This interdisciplinary conference concentrates on the correlation between science and art/design, and the impact of the arts and artistic practices on scientific culture. The scientific focus of the conference is molecular biology, in particular structural biology. As any other micro- and nano-scale science, this research is inherently dependent upon visualising objects and data in the production and communication of scientific knowledge. Visualisation is thus an integral part of the understanding and evolution of new scientific concepts and boundaries.

Interdisciplinary collaboration in visualising molecular structures lies at the very core of contemporary research processes and products. Bringing art, design and science together is far more than just an interesting experiment in transdisciplinary cross-communication, it is a necessary step in exploring new ways of optimising imagery at the molecular level and thus breaking new ground.

We welcome submissions for presentations broadly within visualisation of science. Please submit abstract of no more than 250 words, a brief CV and a few lines on your interest in this conference by email to rsk@mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk before 1 February 2010. For registration and submission of abstract please use the relevant form on our conference website.

Speakers will be notified two weeks after submission deadline. Please be aware that the number of places is limited. Registration and payment must be completed by 11 March 2010.

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).

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.

17 October 2009, 11am, Room G37
(Senate House, South Block, Ground Floor)
Dr. Adelene Buckland (University of Cambridge), ‘Lyell’s Plots’
Dr. Angelique Richardson (University of Exeter), ‘Hardy and Biology’

14 November 2009, 11am, Room G37
(Senate House, South Block, Ground Floor)
Dr. Gowan Dawson (University of Leicester), ‘Palaeontology in Parts: Serializing Science in the Penny Cyclopædia 1833-43′
Dr John Holmes (University of Reading), ‘Darwinism in Victorian Poetry’

12 December 2009, 11am, Room G37
(Senate House, South Block, Ground Floor)
PANEL: After Darwin’s Plots
Professor David Amigoni (Keele University), ‘Fields of Inheritance: Science, Literature and their Relations after Darwin’s Plots‘
Professor Gillian Beer (University of Cambridge), ‘Emotions, Beauty, Consciousness: late Darwin’
Professor Daniel Brown (University of Western Australia), ‘Egerton’s Keynotes: Darwinian naturalism and fin-de-siècle fetishism.’

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

Tuesday 7 April 7.00pm-8.30pm

Speaker: Prof Mark Brake and Rev Neil Hook

Since its emergence in the 17th century science fiction has been a sustained, coherent and subversive check on the promises and pitfalls of science. In turn, invention and discovery have forced writers to confront the nature and limits of reality. This lecture explores how this fascinating symbiosis shapes what we see and do and how we dream of the future.

Admission: Tickets cost £8, £6 concessions, £4 Ri members. You can book tickets online at www.rigb.org or by calling the Events Team on 020 7409 2992 9.00am-5.00pm Monday to Friday.

Venue: The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS

For more information please visit www.rigb.org

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)

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.

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.