August 2019

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In June, we posted news of a campaign to save Charles Lyell's notebooks for the nation. Jim Secord writes with some important updates about how the project is going (emphases mine):

There have been some recent positive developments. First, the Export Bar which expires on 15th July will be extended to a final 15th October deadline. Second, we have confirmed with HMRC (the UK tax authority) and other parties that a Private Treaty Sale for the notebook collection has been agreed. By arranging for the tax to be removed from the sale we have reduced the purchase price from £1,444,000 to £966,000.
With over 800 generous pledges and the University’s own contribution we have now raised over £610,000. The revised deadline and target make our ultimate success a very real possibility.
I look forward to keeping you up to date with our progress. Should we be successful in saving Charles Lyell’s notebooks we will be undertaking an ambitious access project to ensure the collection is as freely available and appreciated as we and our collaborative partners can make it.

If you are moved to support (or further support) this project, you can do so here.

The University of Bayreuth’s professorship of English Literature is seeking a researcher for a three-year project on “Cosmopoetic form-knowledge: astronomy, poetics, and ideology in England, 1500—1800,” funded by the German Research Foundation (www.englit.uni-bayreuth.de/en/research). The project considers ‘form-knowledge’ as a crucial factor in the history of science alongside ‘thing-knowledge’ and ‘people-knowledge’ (cf. Shapin, A Social History of Truth). Specifically, it examines the ways in which astronomical knowledge and the forms used for its mediation acquired, and utilized, ideological and poetological meaning in early modern England.

The successful candidate will conduct a diachronic study of popular pragmatic and didactic genres in which early modern English readers encountered astronomical knowledge, such as the almanac or the astronomy textbook. They will produce a monograph on the ways in which astronomy, in these texts, was linked with political and ideological issues; contribute to an open-access, online bibliography of primary texts for the period in question; and participate in project-related research activities. The position offers the opportunity to write a PhD thesis in this context, gain teaching experience at the University of Bayreuth’s Department of English and American Studies, and be part of the University of Bayreuth Graduate School.

Qualifications

We invite applications from candidates with:

  • a very good master’s degree in English literature, the history of science, comparative literature, history, media studies, or a comparable field;
  • excellent research skills;
  • excellent English language skills (spoken and written).

Experience in working with early modern prints, Latin/neo-Latin reading skills, and experience in digital content management are additional assets.

Conditions of employment

The position is part-time (65%) for three years. The University of Bayreuth offers a salary in accordance with the collective agreement for the public service of the German federal states (Tarifvertrag für dem öffentlichen Dienst der Länder, TV-L) at pay scale E13 (the specific salary will be determined according to individual qualification and professional experience).

The starting date is as soon as possible.

The University of Bayreuth actively supports equality, diversity and inclusion. We encourage women and international candidates to apply. Equally qualified candidates with disabilities or applicants with equivalent status receive preference in the application process.

Application

Please submit the following documents by 15 September 2019 as a single pdf file (max. 10MB) to Prof. Florian Klaeger at <klaeger@uni-bayreuth.de>:

  • a letter of motivation,
  • curriculum vitae (including copies of BA and MA degrees and respective transcripts of records) and names and contact details of two academic referees,
  • one writing sample (e.g., Master’s thesis).

If you have further questions about the position, you are welcome to contact us at the same address.

MDRN, KU Leuven, February 6-7, 2020

By the turn of the twentieth century, the ‘new astronomy’ had developed into a proper scientific discipline, with its own sets of instruments, its own journals, its own jargon, and its own interpretative authority. With the acceleration of new discoveries and insights into stellar phenomena, the emerging mass media ensured that this astronomical knowledge fascinated an even wider audience in the late 19th and early 20th century. At the same time, literature across Europe responded to the fascinating astronomical developments in a variety of modes, styles, and genres. From science fiction stories in penny magazines and didactic stories in boys’ papers to high modernist fiction and avant-garde poetry, many authors aesthetically imagined the starry night that had been scientifically laid out by astronomers. While some of the more highbrow responses to the new astronomical discoveries and innovative physical theories such as relativity theory and quantum theory as well as the response of new ‘science fiction’ have already been extensively studied by literary critics, the larger fictional engagement with the expanding astronomical knowledge awaits further exploration.

This two-day symposium wants to reflect on the many different literary responses to a universe that had been newly imagined and interpreted by astronomers between 1890 and 1950, so as to gauge the role literature played in in mediating astronomical knowledge and exploring new ways of imagining the cosmos. The conference aims to arrive at a better understanding of the convergences between physical, cultural, and literary practices that developed around the new astronomical discoveries between 1890 and 1950. It homes in on writings from different registers—highbrow, avant-garde, middlebrow and more popular forms of literature—as well as on writings from various European cultures and languages, in order to determine how European literature of the modernist period reflects on astronomy as a stimulus and transformative force in fiction. The conference invites papers that address such questions as the following …

  • how did advances in astronomy shape central literary concerns,
  • how was astronomical knowledge narrated in (popular, middlebrow, highbrow) fiction,
  • how did literature participate in the dissemination of astronomical literature in the wider cultural field?
  • how was the astronomical imagination legitimized in the process of knowledge production,
  • how did literature comment on the epistemological status of both astronomy and fiction?

Topics might include (but are not limited to) …

  • literary representation of stellar phenomena
  • convergences between the sciences and cosmological resp. stellar tropes
  • notions of the cosmos in relation to literary form and genre
  • theories of constellations as a poetological concept
  • astronomical fiction across Europe with a comparative approach
  • transnational/-cultural dissemination of astronomical knowledge
  • extraterrestrial life debates in literature
  • well-known and lost authors of popular fiction
  • seeing and vision as a key metaphors in astronomical fiction
  • key figures of the history of astronomy and their literary resurgence (Copernicus, Galilei, Brahe, etc.)

This symposium is part of the larger research project Literary Knowledge, 1890-1950: Modernisms and the Sciences in Europe based in the research lab MDRN at the University of Leuven in Belgium. Please send an abstract (350 words max) and a short bio (250 words max) in the same file to Christoph Richter by October 15th. The presentation of papers should not exceed 20 minutes. Accepted applicants will receive an email confirming their participation by the end of October. We would like to encourage scholars at all stages of their career to consider sending a proposal. A selection of papers will be published in peer-reviewed journal.

Christoph Richter

MDRN

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 - box 3311
3000 Leuven, Belgium

Conference venue: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Campus Germersheim), Germany

Dates: 17th-19th September 2020

By casting scientific communication as “knowledge in transit”, James Secord (2004) drew attention to translation’s central role in shaping the knowledge-sharing processes seminal to scientific endeavour. More recently, both historians of science and of translation studies have placed greater focus on the power dynamics that determine which texts are selected for translation, by whom and for onward transmission into which other languages and scientific cultures. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, “standard” languages of science started to emerge in Europe, marking a shift away from the lingua franca of Latin towards the development of a handful of more “major” languages, which cast themselves as carrying a cultural and intellectual authority in transnational scientific communities. Meanwhile the growing body of work on the relationship between 18th-and 19th-century science and literature has demonstrated that the stylistic choices, rhetorical devices and modes of expression deployed by scientific authors – and also their translators – were key to shaping a work’s credibility and, by association, the integrity of its writer.

Taking as its focus the translation of specialist scientific treatises, handbooks, periodicals, as much as more “popular” works intended for a broader audience (including adolescents and children), this conference seeks to investigate patterns of information flow in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is interested in the productive collaborative exchanges or tensions between authors and translators, the role of translators as gatekeepers of knowledge, and the (in)visibility of women and other subaltern groups in knowledge-making processes in this period. In this energetic period of nation-building, the relationship between identity, language and (trans)national scientific communities increasingly acquires relevance, as do the connections between colonial centre and periphery. The spatial dimensions of the practices of translation are relevant to these developments, as indeed are changes in print culture, distribution and the dynamics of the book market. The conference is also interested in how 20th- or 21st-century (re-)translations of scientific writing from the Enlightenment and Romantic periods have repositioned these source texts and their authors for the modern age.

This conference therefore seeks to develop our understanding of the mobility of scientific print culture by exploring the relationship between scientific writing and translation from the perspectives of cultural studies, translation studies, history of science, archival studies, history of the book and print culture studies. Participants are invited to address one or more of the following issues in their 30-minute papers:

  • scientific institutions, language policy and translation
  • theoretical approaches to the practices of scientific translation
  • science, translation and national identity
  • scientific authorship, style and translation
  • scientific translation and paratext
  • gender, agency and translation in science
  • translation in/of scientific periodicals
  • scientific translation and the materiality of print culture
  • text and image in scientific translation
  • geographies of translation and knowledge exchange
  • readers and reading communities of scientific work in translation
  • 18th- and 19th-century science, translation and the digital humanities

Please send a title, abstract (max. 250 words) and bio (max. 100 words) by 13th September 2019 to Professor Alison E. Martin (JGU Mainz/Germersheim): amarti01@uni-mainz.de

Activism has been instrumental in developing the study and practice of medicine. Working both from within and against the medical profession, medical practitioners, patients, and others have influenced access to care, standards of care, diagnostic practices, medical law, and patient choice and welfare. Activism in Medicine explores some of the different ways in which activism has influenced medicine through history. This collection has grown out of the interdisciplinary symposium ‘The Disease of Caring’, held at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2018 with the support of the Wellcome Institutional Strategic Support Fund.
 
The collection uses a broad definition of both the terms ‘activism’ and ‘medicine’. ‘Medicine’ may cover mental and physical health care, disability care and support, maternity and child care, public health, etc. ‘Activism’ may range from campaigns by medical professionals to patient advocacy to public engagement with medical practices. We are open to proposals from different historical periods up to the present day, and we encourage interdisciplinary approaches and international perspectives.
 
Topics may include, but are not limited to: 
 
·      Activism within and against institutions 
·      Patient advocacy and social models of care
·      Activism by and against medical professionals
·      Public health campaigns
·      Reactions to and against diagnosis
 
We welcome proposals for chapters of up to 7000 words (including notes). Please submit an abstract of up to 500 words to Flore Janssen, Laura Cushing-Harries, and Simon Jarrett at activistmedics@gmail.com by Monday 16 September
BSLS will be proposing two panels to the ‘English: Shared Futures 2’ conference in Manchester next year, and seeks members to represent us, following the Society’s successful panel at the first ‘Shared Futures’ in 2017. The first will be a general panel on the latest research in literature and science, consisting of 5 x 10-minute papers followed by Q&A. There is no theme for this panel, but we particularly welcome papers on literature and science in relation to recent trends/topics in the field, such as popular literature, children’s literature, decanonizing and decolonizing, and the environment. The second is a roundtable, ‘Turning English into STEAM: what can English do with Science - for schools, universities and the public?’, which will seek to showcase (and encourage further) outward-facing work by our members, and will involve 5 speakers.
 
We would like the panels to demonstrate the full breadth of what we do as literature and science scholars, and to involve researchers at all career stages. For those without permanent positions or access to research funds, BSLS will provide bursaries for travel/ accommodation/ registration fees.
 
Please send a title, 100-word description, and brief biog (which includes details regarding your career stage) to the Chair of BSLS, Greg Lynall (g.j.lynall@liverpool.ac.uk), by Monday 23 September.
 
Details regarding the conference itself can be found at <https://www.englishsharedfutures.uk/>
 

 

The ERC-funded project Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth Century Perspectives is pleased to announce the launch of its database for researchers. The database contains a list of over 3000 references, gathered together by researchers on the project. The majority of these are primary sources, with a small selection of secondary sources which provide historical context, from seven of the thematic strands explored by the project: Finance and Speculation, Diseases of Professions and Occupations, Addiction, Climate and Health, Education and Overpressure, Nervous Diseases, Technology and New Inventions. Primary sources range from newspaper and journal articles to printed books, from across the long nineteenth century. 
 
The entries will be helpful for research ranging across nineteenth-century medicine, science and culture. It can be accessed online or downloaded for full functionality at the following link: https://diseasesofmodernlife.web.ox.ac.uk/database. Please share this far and wide! 

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