Graduate Forum: Stella Pratt-Smith (University of Oxford), ‘Mind over Matter: From Sensation to Precision in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Electricity’.

Will Tattersdill (King’s College, London), ‘Two Sides of the Same Page: Science and Fiction in the Late Victorian Periodical.’

Friday 28 May 2010, 2pm.
English Faculty, St Cross Building, Room 10.

Convenors: Dr Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and Dr Michael Whitworth

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.

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).

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.’