Call for expressions of interest
Please respond to k.price@qmul.ac.uk
A call for papers will be circulated in 2013
‘Popular Science, Altered Consciousness and Twentieth-Century Culture’
Date: November 2013 (one-day conference to be held on a Saturday)
Venue: Queen Mary, University of London
Funded by the British Society for the History of Science
Supported by the Centre for the History of the Emotions and the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London
This conference will bring together scholars working on altered
consciousness in relation to popular science, medicine and literature
during the period 1918-1980. The interdisciplinary meeting will
initialise a network for future exchange and collaboration between
historians of mind science and literary critics.
Many literary and popular authors during the mid twentieth-century
represented altered states of consciousness in their writing,
responding to and participating in research relating to such topics as
ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy, mind-altering drugs, psychic therapies,
spiritualisms, conversion, revivals, somnambulism, precognition,
distraction, group mind, multiple personality, hypnotism, lucid
dreaming, Vedanta, hysteria and automatism.
What was the continuing legacy of nineteenth-century approaches to mind
and spirit? How did work at the fringes of psychiatry and psychology
intersect with mind sciences that consolidated their authority during
the mid-twentieth century? What are the key interactions between
British, European, North American and non-Western sources?
Please send queries and expressions of interest to k.price@qmul.ac.uk
