BSLS 2026: Abstracts

The Programme can be found here.

Thursday: 

Panel 1.1: Health Communication

Rachel Cairns (University of Strathclyde), ‘Fategorisation: Constructing fat identity categories in healthcare, popular culture, and fiction’

Fat scholars reject the pathologisation of fat and the medical category “obese” (Murray, 2008; Erdman-Farrell, 2011, 2023; Gailey, 2021), whilst calling for the discontinuation of the Body Mass Index as a measurement of fat degree or health level (Redpath, 2022; Strings, 2023). In the online fatosphere, fat class frameworks have been proposed as alternative categorisation methods (Fat Lip Podcast, 2021; Refinery 29, 2021; Teen Vogue, 2021), with the adoption of descriptors like “mid-size”, “small-fat”, and “infinifat”. Gordon argues that these terms “pinpoint the privileges we experience by virtue of our relative proximity to thinness” (Gordon, 2020). However, fat identity can be harder to outline than first assumed. One’s degree of fatness can depend on social and cultural context, with fat people “shape shifting” from fat to thin in moments without changing size (Erdman-Farrell, 2023). In commercial fiction, fat becomes ambiguous. The “fat” label is often eschewed in favour of softer terms like “curvy”, creating a plausible deniability and allowing readers to dismiss or ignore their fatness. This paper provides an overview of fat categories in medicine, popular culture, and fiction, interrogating their usefulness in a society where thinness grows ever harder to attain, and fat denigration is of more consequence.

Rachel is a third-year PhD researcher at the University of Strathclyde. Her research focuses on fatness and monsters who eat in fiction. Also at Strathclyde, Rachel received her BA in English, Creative Writing and Journalism, and MLitt with Distinction in Interdisciplinary English Studies. Rachel is a recipient of the Peggy Grant Prize, the Global Research Studentship, and was the organiser of the BSLS Winter Symposium 2024/25: ‘Fat Fictions’. Rachel served as a Sabbatical Officer for two years, during which she rooted her academic work within developing liberation and activist discourses, and for her work received the Strathclyde Women in Leadership Network Committee’s Choice Champion Award.

Phoebe O’Leary (University College Dublin), ‘Colin Murphy’s Miasma and the Dynamics of Public Understanding’

Health misinformation remains a major obstacle to public understanding of the scientific process, particularly in the context of infectious diseases. This paper examines how theatre can serve as a tool for science communication by analysing Colin Murphy’s “Miasma”, a play that reimagines the 1850s struggle to understand cholera. By dramatising competing explanations of disease transmission, the performance uses theatre to convey scientific methods, the basics of data science, and the history and nature of epidemics to diverse audiences, often with limited prior engagement with science.
Drawing on analysis of the play’s script and staging, as well as audience responses gathered through post-show surveys and discussions, the paper investigates how “Miasma” encourages reflection on evidence, ambiguity, and the politics of health communication. By drawing parallels between historical misinterpretations of cholera and modern misinformation- including vaccine hesitancy and debates over viral transmission- this paper argues that theatre can transform complex epidemiological histories into emotionally compelling experiences that generate critical literacy and informed public engagement with health policy.

Dr Phoebe O’Leary (she/her) is a postdoctoral research fellow on the Research Ireland Discover project “Miasma: Trust, Data, and Public Health” at University College Dublin. Her work explores how theatrical performance can engage diverse audiences with the scientific method, data science, and the history of epidemics. Previously, her research examined the cultural memory of HIV/AIDS in performance, analysing new forms of biomedical embodiment and the representational challenges of viral undetectability. (https://projectvicteur.com/miasma/)

Aline Ferreira (Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal), ‘Youthful Centenarians and Immortal Babies: Eve Smith’s The Cure (2025) and Kira Peikoff’s No Time to Die (2014)’

This paper examines fictional explorations of life extension and its ethical and social consequences in Eve Smith’s The Cure (2025) and Kira Peikoff’s No Time to Die (2014). It analyses how genetic therapies that dramatically prolong life and technologies that create immortal babies reconfigure family structures while also placing unsustainable pressure on pension and health systems in societies of very long-lived citizens. It also addresses the prospect of an immortal elite whose power may become entrenched through privileged access to cutting-edge reproductive technologies. In both novels, research into ageing is driven by personal tragedy involving progeria, a rare genetic disorder that causes children to age rapidly, linking the search to cure premature senescence with the desire to understand halted ageing. The paper argues that these works function as companion pieces that dramatize the promises and risks of cures to ageing, and it contends that fiction can shape public debate and policy by engaging readers with bioethical dilemmas surrounding unregulated scientific research and the need for more flexible yet responsible regulation.

Aline Ferreira did her First Degree in English and German at the University of Porto, and completed her PhD at the University of London (Birkbeck College) in 1988, with a Thesis on D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster entitled “The Unfulfilled Journey: A Comparative Study of E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence” and supervised by Prof. Miriam Allott. She has been teaching since 1987 at the University of Aveiro, where she has been an Associate Professor since 1996.

Panel 1.2: Caribbean Writing and the Blue Humanities 

Elina Valovirta (University of Turku, Finland), ‘Escapes by Water: Materialist Caribbean Waterways and the Blue Humanities’

In transnational Caribbean women’s writing, connections with water, ocean, rivers, and other types of aquatic fluidity, are ubiquitous. This paper focuses on the role of water and waterways by considering the sea, water and seascapes as vital to literary expression and its dissemination; water is a fundamental source of identity formation, and a dynamic element in Caribbean literature (Neumann & Rupp 2016). This dynamism means, that the sea is also an active agent pointing to water’s materiality in its encounters with humans (e.g. Alaimo, Gaard, McLeod).

This paper argues, that the very materiality of water allows escape and emancipation or survival in Caribbean women’s writing from recent years. This paper investigates flights by water in Caribbean novels such as He Drown She in the Sea (Shani Mootoo, 2005), The Ventriloquist’s Tale (Pauline Melville, 1997), Black Rock (Amanda Smyth, 2009) and River Sing Me Home (Eleanor Shearer, 2023). A materialist ecocritical and blue humanities reading of water as an escape – not just as a route to travel by – denotes how beyond human control those escapes are. Furthermore, journeys previously interpreted as largely metaphorical, become literal and material when survival and marronage are analysed from the viewpoint of human-water relations and their entanglements.

Bio: Elina Valovirta is a senior lecturer at the Department of English, University of Turku, Finland. She is the author of Sexual Feelings. Reading Anglophone Caribbean Women’s Writing Through Affect (2014, Rodopi) and the co-editor of Thinking with the Familiar in Contemporary Literature and Culture ‘Out of the Ordinary’ (2019, Brill). She has published articles in journals such as The Feminist Review, Sexuality and Culture, The European Journal of Cultural Studies, and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

June Douglas (St. George’s University), ‘An exploration of environmental change portraying environmental degradation and offering insight into future challenges through the lens of Caribbean experiences’

An exploration of environmental change portraying environmental degradation and offering insight into future challenges through the lens of Caribbean experiences.
An exploration of environmental change through three Caribbean writers. The Dominican author Rita Indiana addresses issues of polluted oceans and the misuse of wealth through the magical tentacles of a rare sea anemone and time travel to resolve issues in her award-winning novel, Tentacle. Drawing on her understanding of historical impacts on current destruction, Indiana explores the connection between 16th-century colonisation and contemporary inequality, as well as the threat that climate change poses to her people. Combining the past, present, and future, Akhim Alexis’s short story The Lexicographer and One Tree Island focuses on the loss of dialect and identity caused by extreme weather. Finally, Nadine Thomlinson highlights the issues of resource depletion caused by overfishing, seen through the perspective of a Jamaican woman with broader implications. These three portrayals of environmental degradation offer insight into future challenges through the lens of Caribbean experiences.

Bio: Dr. June Douglas is currently a Professor and Deputy Chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Science, St. George’s University Grenada, where she has lived and worked for the past 16 years. A graduate from Westminster University, University College London, Nottingham & Trent University, her most recent publication is ‘Equitable Education and Ghettoized Voices. A deficit ideology of poverty in the Caribbean’ Routledge 2024. She is the Caribbean representative of CoSciLit.

Antonia MacDonald (St. George’s University), ‘Ecological Precarity and Poetic Form in Derek Walcott’s “The Sea at Dauphin”’

This paper examines Derek Walcott’s The Sea at Dauphin through the lens of the Blue Humanities, a critical framework that foregrounds the ocean as a site of cultural, historical, and ecological meaning. In this one-act play, Walcott engages the Caribbean Sea as both material and metaphorical presence, shaping identities and narratives of displacement, colonialism, and environmental vulnerability. Rather than functioning as mere backdrop, the sea emerges as a living, omnipresent force governing the rhythms of village life. For the fishermen, it is both sustenance and threat—offering daily bread through its bounty while menacing survival with storms and drowning. This duality underscores the precariousness of existence in small-island economies, where every venture onto the water becomes an act of faith as much as labor. Walcott’s portrayal of the sea as agent and archive anticipates contemporary ecological discourses: the villagers’ vulnerability to scarcity and disaster resonates with current concerns about climate change and small-island precarity. In this sense, The Sea at Dauphin participates in an early Caribbean environmental consciousness, positioning Walcott’s maritime imagination as foundational to oceanic studies and central to the emergent field of the Blue Humanities.

Bio:
Antonia MacDonald is a professor and Chair in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Arts and Sciences, and Associate Dean in the School of Graduate Studies, St. George’s University. Prof. MacDonald writes on contemporary Caribbean women writers, St. Lucian literature, and Eastern Caribbean popular culture. She is the author of Making Homes in the West/Indies (Garland, 2002) and editor of the collection, The Fiction of Garth St. Omer: A Casebook (Peepal Tree Press, 2018). She is also a senior editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL).

Panel 1.3: What, Why, How?: Ways of thinking with about culture and genomics

This panel asks what genomics has done for the humanities. Thinking with genomics has presented a range of avenues for thinking about contemporary culture and literature, and new challenges: what can be read, by whom, through what means, and to what end? The unmet promise of genomics — to capture organic life in total code — might be seen to foreshadow AI’s strange and partial realities, but what does this promise say about a more general desire to code reality, or to make it totally legible? We reflect upon method and the implications of these new developments in genomics, taking a multidisciplinary approach across literature, law, ethics, and philosophy. What kinds of new knowing and practice have been enabled, articulated, occluded and configured? Our talks look at the what, why, and how of new work in this area.

Lara Choksey (UCL): ‘Environments of blame and their dissonant oscillations’

When ecocide becomes an international crime, what or who will take the blame for ecological damage? Making the biomolecular legible has meant correlating information across a dense range of scales to make it meaningful and usable. This has demanded a complex set of approaches to reconcile weird correspondences between different forms of matter and the ways they operate together (Morton, 2014). Rather than attempting to synthesise these scales, this paper explores some dissonant oscillations between hyper- and molecular objects when it comes to responding to, and being responsible for, ecological damage. Drawing on some poetic and legal projects that set about uncovering logistics of this damage, the paper examines imagined and material tipping points between reproach and accusation, and the sense of a world-ecology that would give acts of blame political power (Moore, 2011).

Jay Clayton (Vanderbilt University): ‘Transdisciplinary Collaboration: Literature and Genomics’

This paper discusses a multi-year research project aimed at uncovering how culture affects people’s understanding of genomics, and it illustrates a new model of transdisciplinary collaboration among the humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, medicine, and law. After outlining for humanists some of the bioethical issues raised by genomics, Clayton explores the advantages of transdisciplinary collaborations for humanist scholars and outlines the principal findings of a decade-long project charged with assessing culture’s impact on public attitudes toward genomics.

Jerome de Groot (University of Manchester): ‘Neanderthal Mud: Towards a Biomolecular Hamlet’

This paper seeks to understand how new biomolecular data and techniques might be used to approach Hamlet, and, indeed, how the play anticipates this reconfiguring. Taking Svante Pääbo’s work on DNA in the sediment of Denisova cave as a starting point, the paper considers the ways in which biomolecular investigation refigures our understanding of (quite literal) entanglement and sentience. What is the ontology of the entangling of bodies with other substances, and then the subsequent disentanglement of sediment that is found in Pääbo’s work? The paper begins to sketch out ways that a biomolecular reading might be outlined. Does new data and approach allow a rereading of Hamlet? Or do these new techniques simply echo concepts that Hamlet himself had articulated? What does this mean for the humanities now?

 

Panel 1.4: 19^th-Century Popular Science 

Madeleine Chalmers (University of Glasgow), ‘Not Rocket Science: Making Space for All with Camille Flammarion’

From the bestselling Popular Astronomy to free, standing-room-only lectures for Parisian factory workers, the French astronomer and scientific popularizer Camille Flammarion (1842—1925) literally and figuratively made space for all. This paper suggests that Flammarion’s ethos might yet provide resources for twenty-first-century space studies. First, it highlights Flammarion’s vision of space as infusing our lives on earth. ‘If you crack open the champagne after dinner, you are drinking the sun in a bottle,’ he declared. Flammarion sought to mobilize audiences’ sensual imaginations through thought experiments, lush illustrations, dialogues, and collapsible models which made the constellations portable. Yet, this scientific popularization went hand-in-hand with a profoundly spiritual understanding of space which he explored in esoteric fictions of extraterrestrial life and time dilation. Against a historical backdrop of European colonial expansion and subjugation, this paper will explore how Flammarion presented space as a realm that can never be wholly appropriated by humans. His lifelong commitment to space education through imagination was powered by the belief that it was a tool for intellectual and political emancipation. The paper will therefore close by placing his writings in dialogue with twenty-first-century innovations in space education.

Madeleine Chalmers is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research explores how French literature and thought can speak to twenty-first-century questions in the fields of science, technology, and epistemology. She is the author of French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). From January 2025, she will be Lecturer in Liberal Arts at the University of Glasgow.

Gary Kelly (University of Alberta), ‘Science as Literature: Penny-Periodical Poetics for Mechanics’ Modernity’

From the 1820s, publishers of penny-number periodicals, often associated with working-class reform movements, aimed to make modern knowledges, ‘science’ as widely understood then, accessible to those who could afford the penny–‘mechanics’ or skilled workers and their families. Unlike similar secular and religious agents, these penny-print publishers aimed to provide their readers with materials for self-fashioning as modern in their own way and interests, rather than a version of those developed by and for the middle classes. More effectively to engage mechanic readers in this historic project, penny-print publishing teams avowedly aimed to fuse the ‘scientific’ and ‘literary’, broadly defined, in a poetics of form, language, genre, style, and publishing format at once ‘popular’ and practical. This purposely democratic scientific literature aimed not only to inform by engaging its users but also to enable them to ‘improve’ their ‘taste’ in the process of fashioning themselves as distinctively modern in their own political as well as economic interests. This argument is illustrated by reading mechanic-wise the poetics of penny knowledge-weeklies from two representative publishers, Edwin Dipple and William Gibbs, during the social, economic, and political crisis of the ‘hungry ’forties’.

Bethany Dahlstrom (Independent Scholar), ‘After-Dinner Science: Parlour Microscopy and Victorian Bird Preservation’

This paper examines how the growing portability of the Victorian microscope reshaped practices of observing, classifying, and ultimately valuing the non-human world – particularly birds. While early eighteenth- and nineteenth-century microscopes were cumbersome scientific instruments, by the mid-Victorian period, they had become compact, affordable, and increasingly integrated into domestic life. This shift facilitated the emergence of what I would call parlour microscopy: after-dinner demonstrations in which men gathered to examine feathers, eggshell fragments, and other avian specimens under magnification, often as women were ushered into separate rooms to engage in more socially “appropriate” conversation. Drawing on periodical accounts, natural history manuals, and the early rhetoric of bird protection societies, this paper explores how these gendered spaces of scientific leisure intersected with the wider bird preservation movements that gave rise to the RSPB. I argue that the microscope’s portability not only intensified amateur engagement with animal studies but also shaped the cultural politics of what – and who – counted as legitimate scientific observers. By tracing the entanglements between domestic microscopy, avian conservation, and gendered authority, the paper reveals how a seemingly modest technological development reframed Victorian ways of seeing, knowing, and protecting the natural world.

Dr Bethany Dahlstrom is an independent scholar who recently completed her PhD at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on human-bird relations, ecofeminism, and the cultural politics of species in the long nineteenth century, with recent work examining bird migration, early protectionist movements, and representations of birds across popular periodicals. She is particularly interested in how women entered male-dominated scientific and social spaces, forming societies devoted to bird protection and strategically aligned themselves with birds to challenge restrictive cultural narratives. Her broader research considers how ideas about gender, species, and environment shaped public debates around conservation and ecological care.

 

Panel 1.5: Frankenstein’s Afterlives 

Jasmine Erdener and Şima İmşir (Koç University), ‘When the Monster Wants Love: AI and Affective Labour in Del Toro’s Frankenstein’

Fiction has often portrayed artificial intelligence as a looming threat that colonizes and controls the ‘inferior race’ of humans (Cave and Dihal, 2006), or, for Samuel Butler in ‘Darwin Among the Machines’ (1863), a future of subjugation in which the best we may hope is that machines ‘treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals.’ However, Guillermo del Toro’s recent Frankenstein (2025), based on Mary Shelley’s novel, depicts an artificial creature driven to violence not by nature but by Victor Frankenstein’s paternal rejection. Oscillating between gothic horror and the uncanny valley, changes made to the source text in Del Toro’s film presents the creature, and by extension social AI, as humanity’s progeny, friend, or lover, shifting the technological narrative from domination to companionship. The film provides a framework to understand contemporary social technologies as companions, and suggests that humans must perform the affective labor that will keep the creature docile. This shift signals the emergence of a new type of affective capitalism in which AI companions are marketed as friends, lovers, or soulmates, trading powerful emotional bonds in exchange for intimate information and personal data.

Jasmine Erdener is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Visual Arts at Koç University. Her research examines the intersections between technology, media, and politics. Her current book project, entitled From Puppet to Robot: Reimagining Technological Fantasies and Futures, focuses on how puppetry can challenge dominant technological ideologies and model forms of collective organizing and resistance. Her next project examines thanatechnologies, which are an attempt at technological immortality, and how these technologies impact surveillance, individual identity, and labor. Her research on thanatechnologies has been published in New Media and Society. Her work has also appeared in Communication and the Public, Communication, Culture, and Critique, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Cultural Politics, and Surveillance & Society. Her courses focus on technology and society, media and culture, and gender and politics.

Şima İmşir is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Koç University. She is the author of Health, Literature and Women in Twentieth-Century Turkey: Bodies of Exception (Routledge, 2023) and the co-editor of Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction (Manchester UP, forthcoming). Her articles have appeared, or are forthcoming, in edited collections and journals, including Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Research in Gender Studies, A History of Middle Eastern Modernism (Cambridge University Press), Turkish Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury), Women of the Middle East (Routledge), and Monsters in Society (Brill). Her teaching and research range from medical and health humanities and illness and literature to comparative modernism and technology and literature.

Brianna Nicole Frentzko (University of York), ‘Mad Scientist for Sale: Commodifying the Pursuit of Knowledge in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’

In Oryx and Crake (2003), Margaret Atwood capitalizes on past literary mad scientists to comment on how scientific knowledge is acquired and used. Hilde Staels (2006) argues that Atwood is specifically conducting an ironic parody of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Sławomir Kozioł (2018) adds that Crake’s artistic creation parallels and critiques Victor’s intentions and results. Frankenstein is often misread to position science as inherently dangerous, however, I argue with Theodore Ziolkowski (1981) that “scientific creation is morally neutral” in the novel. Instead, as Alan Rauch (1995) explains, Frankenstein’s failure as a scientist is his refusal to engage in the communal processes of science; he acquires knowledge covertly, never shares it, and does not consider its impact on society.

Crake superficially escapes this critique because he practices science within a culture of rampant consumerism. Atwood crafts a near-future dystopia wherein corporations have effectively displaced democratic governments leading to unregulated biotechnical advances, deepened social stratification, and an overproduction of information and unnecessary goods. I will interrogate how Crake manipulates this system to market scientific knowledge as a commodity his society needs while covertly producing the means to destroy humanity. Atwood reevaluates the mad scientist for a world where everything is for sale.

Brianna Nicole Frentzko is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of York. Her doctoral research considers Frankenstein-analogue texts published since the 1980s to explore questions of reproduction, rebellion, and the “human.” Brianna received her BA in English from the College of William & Mary (2012). She taught high school English before receiving her MA in Secondary Education from the University of New Mexico (2015). At the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she achieved a dual MFA/MA in Creative Writing Fiction and English (2019). Before beginning her PhD, she taught college composition and published several short speculative fiction stories.

Georgina Kosanovic (Regent High School, London), ‘Dangerous Doctors and Terrifying Technology:  What GCSE Novels Say about Science’

In England, well over half a million students sit a GCSE English Literature exam every year. The majority of these exams are sat by students in Year 11. With a general decline in reading for pleasure, the novels studied for GCSE English Literature may be, in many cases, the only long works of fiction that students read during their GCSE years. In these cases, and due to the fact that the novels are studied in depth, the content and themes of these books may have a disproportionate influence on the readers. England’s commercially competitive examination system, with four boards vying for the custom of state schools, provides an opportunity to compare first, the novels selected for each board’s specification; second, the suggested approaches within that specification in terms of content and theme; and finally, the emphases on certain aspects of content and theme in the questions set on the exams. This paper will make that comparison, focusing on novels that have some aspect related to science, such as Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and reflect upon the explicit and implicit messages about science that the different exam boards’ approaches impart.

Georgina Kosanovic has worked in secondary education for over 30 years in Canada and England, including as a teacher of GCSE English Literature. She is currently a Sixth Form Co-ordinator at a state school in Central London.

 

Panel 1.6: Indian Fiction and the Body 

Sadaf Mehmood (Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad), ‘Biopolitics of Syphilis: Women, Contagion and Urdu Literary Imagination’

Epidemiology of syphilis became a key mechanism to introduce imperial medicalization and scientific regulation of sexuality in British India. By tracing the axes of colonial medicine, sexological and epidemiological discourses, this paper explores how the pathology of sexuality institutionalized the stigmatization and exclusion of women in prostitution. In so doing, I will focus on Mirza M. Hadi Rusva’s Umrao Jan Ada (1899) to investigate the ways sexual politics of the British Empire constructed contagion as a referent in controlling female sexuality in the region. I argue that this Urdu novel was conceived as a counter-narrative to document an alternative history of sexual life in India. While existing scholarship has explored the medical or epidemiological dimensions of syphilis (Legg, 2014; Tambe, 2009; Levine, 2003), this paper specifically explores how literary narratives refracted these anxieties through the representation of women in prostitution. By bringing together medical science and literary representations, this study investigates how imperial authority consolidated its absolute power by treating women in prostitution as disposable subjects.

Dr. Sadaf Mehmood is an Assistant Professor at Quaid-i-Azam University and a Global South Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. She received a Commonwealth Scholarship to complete her Ph.D. research at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Her study explored the representations of prostitution in South Asian narratives. With several publications to her name, her research focuses on South Asian Literature, Women’s studies, and disability Literature.

Aysha Femin NK (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani), ‘The Affective Life of Smallpox in Select Twentieth-Century Malayalam Novels’

Despite its medical eradication, smallpox remains uneradicated through its pockmarked survivors, its traumatized witnesses, and the cultural impressions it left on people’s use of language and everyday social interactions. Smallpox was interpreted in multiple ways across diverse spatiotemporal and epistemic contexts: within medical discourse as an endemic, epidemic, or pandemic; in popular imagination as a dreaded and incurable disease; and in various cultural frameworks as a curse, a cosmological sign, or a form of divine punishment. Literary expressions of smallpox from twentieth-century Kerala, a state in India, serve as critical interventions that reflect on the experiences of disease as mediated through intersecting structures of caste, gender, domesticity, and ritual. It opens up an inquiry into how smallpox became a context for legitimizing biomedicine through coercive measures, such as the vaccine, and how such coercion, in turn, transformed the language and meaning of health and illness in Kerala. Episodes of smallpox outbreaks in the select literary works are represented not as background events but as critical devices that both reflect and interrogate the socio-cultural and institutional configurations of the time. This paper aims to examine how Malayalam (one of the prominent languages of Kerala) literary narratives illuminate the disease experience during the twentieth-century smallpox outbreak in Kerala and the lived experiences of marginalized communities. As literary imaginations, they become generative sites for exploring how the languages of disease, forms of storytelling, and aesthetic choices help reimagine the meanings of health and illness, offering alternative vocabularies to think through pain, care, and survival. In doing so, they challenge the dominance of biomedical knowledge and open up new possibilities for how illness is thought, spoken, and lived.

Aysha Femin is a PhD scholar at BITS Pilani – Hyderabad Campus, India.

 

Panel 2.1:  Interchanges: Science, Medicine, Politics, Poetry 

Michael H. Whitworth (Merton College, Oxford), ‘Scientific Citations of Virginia Woolf’

What do Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics and European Urology have in common? All are scientific journals in which works by Virginia Woolf have been cited. Between 1952 and the present, Woolf has been cited over 120 times in journals classified by the Web of Science database as “scientific.” There now exists an extensive literature on the ways that Woolf incorporated scientific discourse into her work (e.g., Rachel Crossland [2018], Catriona Livingstone [2022]), and there exists a small critical literature on scientists reading poetry (e.g. John Holmes [2012] on how scientists read Tennyson) and on their quoting it in their scientific or “metascientific” writings (e.g. James Brooke-Smith [2012], Gillian Daw [2015], and Gregory Tate [2020]), but nothing has been written, so far as I know, on scientists reading and citing Woolf.

This paper will categorise the reasons for her being cited: in some cases as a historical witness; in others as a feminist aware of the force of gender in professional development; in others as a writer who articulated the nature of pain; and in others as a touchstone for a sceptical epistemology in which the theorist should be cautious of the power of theory.

Michael H. Whitworth is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture in the English Faculty, University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. His most recent articles and chapters on literature and science include “Quantum Theories and Modernism: Complementarity in Virginia Woolf, William James, Henri Bergson, and Niels Bohr” (2024), “Bloomsbury and Science” (2025), “Serious Rivals: Popular Physics Writing as Non-Canonical Literature” (forthcoming, 2026), “Making Things More Spiritual: Virginia Woolf, Science, and Religion” (forthcoming, 2026

Brian Hurwitz (King’s College London), ‘The Invention of “Medical Humanities”’

This paper locates the coinage of the term “Medical Humanities” to the 1919 sales catalogue of a UK publisher based in New York, which until now has escaped notice. It examines the intellectual, institutional, educational, and Anglo-American contexts of its initial usage which positioned “Medical Humanities” as a subcategory of “Medical Belles-Lettres”, which functioned as the holding pattern for the initial meaning of the term. Conceived as part of a marketing exercise aimed at a medical audience, “Medical Humanities” nominated a list of book titles that spanned the junctures of medicine, history, literature, art, and education. But its meaning went beyond a publishing and commercial scenario; the coinage responded to a critique of biomedical instrumentalism that developed at the beginning of the twentieth century which engendered the conceptual orientations from which the field of Medical Humanities arose. The inventive step that produced the term also turned also on a newly arrived at notion of “the humanities” as a collection of ill-knit academic areas, each with its own tradition and objects of interest that compartmentalized subject areas one from the other. The initial usage of the term points to a more complicated lineage than is usually recounted in Medical Humanities scholarship which places its origins in the 1960s.

Brian Hurwitz is Emeritus Professor of Medicine and the Arts at King’s College London. He trained in medicine and worked as a general practitioner in London for 30 years. He co-directed the KCL Centre for the Humanities and Health, a multidisciplinary Research Centre that offered masters, PhD and postdoctoral education for humanities scholars, bio-scientists and health professionals.

Ángeles Jordán Soriano (University of Almería, Spain), ‘The Scientific Revolution as Fashion: Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poem “Epicurus” and the Spectacle of Modernity’

This paper examines Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s poem “Epicurus”, an early, previously uncollected work from the 1960s, later published in Anthony Barnett’s Collected Poems (2008), as a site for exploring the cultural banalisation of science in 1960s Britain. Although Forrest-Thomson frequently incorporated scientific models, vocabulary and structures into her poetry, “Epicurus” demonstrates her acute awareness of the risks when science is co-opted as a fashionable trend. Written during Harold Wilson’s government, which promoted a national “scientific revolution,” the poem critiques the transformation of scientific knowledge into a consumable aesthetic evident in television, fashion and popular media. Through allusions such as Alcibiades, who is emblematic of opportunism, hedonism and political manoeuvring, Forrest-Thomson exposes what she terms “response without responsibility,” capturing youth culture “sunstruck by the dazzle of bright surfaces, / sensation without sense” (45).
The poem juxtaposes Epicurean discipline, expressed in the line “Pleasure is such an exacting discipline,” with contemporary superficiality, revealing the tension between thoughtful engagement and commodified spectacle. Using cultural studies alongside textual and historical analysis, the paper situates “Epicurus” within Wilsonian technocracy, the de-academisation of science and the emergent consumer-scientific aesthetic described by later historians. Forrest-Thomson offers a critically alert perspective on science’s visibility in popular culture. She is neither anti-scientific nor simply lamenting cultural decline, but rather examines how scientific discourse can lose substance when absorbed into the spectacle of 1960s mass culture.

Ángeles Jordán Soriano holds a PhD in English Studies from the University of Almería, where she is currently a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Philology, funded by an FPU fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Universities. She is an expert in British literature and culture, with a particular focus on the literary and cultural history of the 1960s. Her research focuses on the intersection of politics and artistic production during Harold Wilson’s first government (1964–1970). In 2021, she received the Patricia Shaw Research Award from the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN), which enabled her to undertake a research stay at the University of Kent. She has also been a visiting researcher at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She currently combines her research with undergraduate teaching at the University of Almería.

Annabel Williams (University of St Andrews), ‘‘A flat earth view of the mind’: Cold War Pseudoscience and the Work of Arthur Koestler’

Once famed for his astute commentary on mid-century European politics, Arthur Koestler was by the late 1960s more notorious for his interest in parapsychology. His work of the period included the ambitious, flawed treatise, The Ghost in the Machine (1967), ranging across the so-called ‘two cultures’ divide to posit a new philosophy of mind. Orthodox scientists lambasted Koestler’s receptivity to anti-rational models of cognition, which some considered a regression to the magical thinking that informed his 1930s membership of the Communist Party of Germany.

This paper explores how Koestler’s writings illuminate some of the ways in which scientific methodologies were instrumentalised, and contested, in political contexts during the Cold War. Notably, this includes the question of what it is to be rational, and whether the suspension of scepticism still allows for rational thought. In novels such as The Call Girls (1972), Koestler draws striking parallels between the operation and consequences of pseudoscience in political and scientific realms. Drawing on scholarship into the methodological value of the ‘pseudo’ (Kingori 2019), and interrogations of rationalism in modern science (Nathan and Stengers 2018), I contend that attention to Koestler’s magical thinking frames a distinctive cultural moment of thinking about the mind.

Annabel Williams is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of St Andrews. She is co-editor of Telepoetics: Writing the Phone in Literature, Culture and Theory (2026). In 2020-21 she was Library Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, where she researched the papers of Arthur Koestler. Her current project explores representations of pseudoscience and remote control, and their instrumentalization in political contexts, in modernist and mid-century literature. She has published work on this in the co-edited volume British Writing, Propaganda, and Cultural Diplomacy in the Second World War and Beyond (2024).

 

Panel 2.2: Empirical Methods in Literature and Science 

Charlotte Stobart (University of Cambridge), ‘Technological Embodiment: Experiences of Calliper Usage Among British Polio Disabled Individuals, 1950-2025′

Experiences of Calliper Usage Among British Polio Disabled Individuals, 1950-2025′. The cultural, academic, and sociomedical significance of callipers as an assistive technology has long been overlooked. This paper examines experiences of calliper usage among British polio-disabled individuals, drawing on oral history interviews, conducted with ten polio-disabled individuals who use(d) callipers between 1950 and 2025, to provide a ‘history from below’, foregrounding marginalised perspectives which are largely historiographically absent. Using the lens of “technological embodiment”, it explores the integration of callipers into lived and bodily experiences, shaping perception, movement, emotion, identity, and even bodily boundaries. Additionally, it frames callipers, the polio-disabled body, and the embodied self as “co-constructed”, examining how technologies shape bodily capacities and subjectivities and how users in turn shape meanings and uses of technologies. It examines: [1] callipers and the body as co-constructed, through impacts on sensations, movement, and boundaries; [2] callipers and emotions as co-constructed, with emotions also impacted by socio-culturally structured (self-)silencing; and [3] calliper usage as changing through time, impacting life course expectations, especially in childhood and later adulthood. Thus, it reveals the embodied, historical, cultural, and emotional significance of callipers and the long-term cultural impact of polio-disability through its overlooked material afterlife.

Charlotte Stobart is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge in the History and Philosophy of Science. Her research focuses on lived experiences of polio-disability in different cultural contexts, combining disability and postcolonial studies.

 

Soondus Aslam (Royal College of General Practitioners), ‘Medical Musings on Pain, Pedagogy, and Practice as Prompted by Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower’

Pain is part and parcel to human existence; however, individual perceptions of pain are uniquely informed by complex cultural, racial, gendered and socio-economic factors. No one understood this better than Afrofuturistic author Octavia Butler, who paradoxically presents the protagonist of PARABLE OF THE SOWER as the hyper-empathic embodiment of pain, yet authorially admits that Lauren Olamina “is not empathic. She feels herself to be. Usually in science fiction ‘empathic’ means that you really are suffering . . . and she is not. She has this delusion that she cannot shake.” Merging my practice and pedagogy as a medical doctor who has investigated pain in clinical settings and the classroom for over 20 years, my paper will (1) draw parallels between the novel’s narrativization of Lauren’s pain and my practical experience with patients and students concerning a range of pains [i.e. physical, emotional, cultural, traumatic, psychosomatic], and (2) musingly map medical and pedagogical explorations of how variants of pain are defined/coped with from intersectionally diverse perspectives while considering how they can be healed since “pain is not due to the thing itself, but to [one’s] estimate of it; and this [one has] the power to revoke at any moment.”—Marcus Aurelius.

Dr Soondus Aslam, MBBS, MRCGP, is a General Practitioner with special interest in Mental Health, Women’s Health, and Sexual Health. She has practiced medicine in the Northeast of England since 2008 and has been affiliated with St Aidan’s College, Durham University, as a Student Development Mentor since 2014 and College Advisory Board Member since 2020. In recent years, she has been involved in supporting refugees, asylum seekers and ethnic minorities in her role as a healthcare professional. She has worked with Newcastle Medical School and has taught medical students in classroom and clinical settings. Fluent in English, Urdu, Punjabi, and Hindi, she has parallel interests in creative writing which encompasses fiction, poetry, health, and contemporary issues and has published over 50 short stories, essays, and articles in Pakistan.

 

Panel 2.3: H. G. Wells, Evolution, and Deep Time 

Lily Fell (University of Manchester), ‘Deep time in deep water: panic and marshland materiality in H. G. Wells’ The Croquet Player (1936)’

H. G. Wells’ The Croquet Player (1936) is a text that grapples with the ‘endemic’ panic generated by evolutionary theories and by geological and archaeological investigations of deep human and planetary time. In this talk I will analyse how the marshland forms a uniquely appropriate setting for this panic, as an environment which is capable of preserving deep-time artefacts (due to its peat-infused waters and soils) and as a setting with a distinctive materiality and deep symbolic resonances which Wells exploits throughout his text. The marsh – with its paradoxical status as water and land, its apparently unbounded horizons, its reflective, clouded pools of stagnant water – is a place in which things are easily lost, time becomes warped and revenants seem to walk. Wells harnesses long-standing beliefs about wetland miasmas being pathogenic in order to suggest that the marsh itself could be the cause of the panic, an approach which enables a comparison of Wells’ literary text with contemporaneous agricultural tracts relating to (and arguing for) wetland drainage. The talk draws on Blue Humanities and EcoGothic scholarship, especially the concept of ecophobia, to analyse the distinctiveness and significance of the marsh within The Croquet Player.

Lily is in the first year of her PhD at the University of Manchester. Her project, ‘The wealth of wetlands?’, seeks to analyse long nineteenth-century literary and scientific discourses relating to wetland sites (with a focus on upland peat bogs in the north west and south west of England). Her supervisory team is split between English Literature and Archaeology, as the project is particularly focused on the ways in which antiquarian writings and literary texts about wetlands intersect.

Billie Gavurin (University of Birmingham), ‘Gothic Palaeoanthropologies at the Turn of the Century’

This paper examines the relationship between human prehistory and the Gothic in three late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts: Grant Allen’s ‘Pallinghurst Barrow’ (1892), Arthur Conan-Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-2), and H. G. Wells’ The Croquet Player (1936). In each of these works, the traditional Gothic fascination with inheritance and the lingering presence of the past takes on an evolutionary dimension. People and landscapes both find themselves haunted by traces of humanity’s deep past, whether physical (the surviving barrows, stone huts, and artefacts that litter the British countryside), or physiological (the unsettling knowledge that all modern humans carry evolutionary traces of our semi-bestial past incarnations). In all three texts, the deep past proves unquiet, and ancient ghosts both literal and metaphorical stubbornly refuse to be laid to rest. In this paper, I suggest that the analysis of such ‘Gothic palaeoanthropologies’ can shed light on the uneasy cultural reception of human prehistory at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries, as the knowledge of our species’s deep past was absorbed increasingly into the popular imagination.

Billie Gavurin is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is interested in the relationship between evolutionary science and mythology in fin-de-siècle culture, and her current research project focuses on counterfactual depictions of prehistoric hominins from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. She has published articles on H. G. Wells and Algernon Blackwood, and her first monograph is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan.

Gemma Curto (University of Sheffield), ‘A “Tangled Skein”: Evolution, Chance, and Environmental Instability from Julian Huxley and the Wells (1929) to Rachel Carson (1962)’

This paper examines how early twentieth-century scientific and literary texts articulated ideas of chaos, instability, and environmental unpredictability long before chaos theory was formulated. I explore how H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G. P. Wells’ The Science of Life (1936[1929]) presents evolution as a ‘chaotic affair’, shaped by chance, disruption, and nonlinear processes occurring between species (1936[1929]). Their model of evolution as a ‘tangled skein’ anticipates later concerns regarding complexity and sensitivity to environmental disruption (1936[1929]). I consider Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains (1931), which foregrounds the role of environmental forces in shaping historical processes, prefiguring contemporary accounts about biodiversity loss and environmental unpredictability. These narratives create a foundation for understanding Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), in which ecological systems are shown to be susceptible to scale effects, feedbacks, and human-induced forms of instability. Through her integration of scientific discourse and literary techniques, Carson lays the groundwork for literary texts that emphasise instability and interdependence within environmental narratives. By tracing these early representations of environmental unpredictability, the paper demonstrates how literary and scientific discourses jointly shaped modern environmental consciousness.

Gemma Curto has recently graduated with a PhD in English Literature from the University of Sheffield. Her work investigates the intersections of literature, scientific methodologies, and ecological thought. She has published an article in Green Letters titled ‘The Modern Trend of Time: Prigogine and Stengers on Scientific Progress in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia’ (2024), and has another article in Green Letters in which she explores representations of floods in biocentric graphic novels (2020). Gemma is a co-host of the Green Listening: Discussions in Ecocriticism podcast.

Claudia Sterbini (University of Edinburgh), ‘Sexology, Nonsexual Patients, Nonsexual Doctors: Threatening Failed Evolutions in The Island of Doctor Moreau’

This paper traces the history of asexuality through the construction of ‘nonsexuality’ in fin-de-siècle sexology and literature. I argue that late nineteenth-century sexology formulated a precise figure of the man who abstains from sex or lacks sexual attraction, diagnosing this as a nonsexual aetiology. This figure crosses the porous boundaries between sexological discourse and literature. Specifically, I examine how H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau reflects and reinterprets the pathological nonsexuality of Havelock Ellis’s Studies. Wells not only mirrors Ellis’s aetiology but also generates parallel formulations that effectively do sexology. Doctor Moreau emerges as a hybrid figure: it embodies Ellis’s nonsexual patient while simultaneously forming a more threatening category, that of the nonsexual doctor. I argue the symptoms that characterise Moreau’s nonsexuality enables him to birth a nonsexual progeny through nonsexual means. As such, he stands between the patients of sexology and the nonsexual monsters of Wells’s later works, such as the Martians. I explore how nonsexuality in both authors becomes a crux of eugenic and racial anxieties, casting the nonsexual man as both vision of evolutionary progress and symbol of degeneration. I contend that nonsexuality becomes a defining sexual category in Wells’s work, intricately linked to contemporary debates on race, eugenics, and sexuality.

Claudia Sterbini is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Her project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, explores the construction of pathological asexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. She is interested in queer history, the medical humanities and Victorian literature and culture. She has published on the challenges of medical humanities methods and on the objects of sexology in the medical humanities blog The Polyphony, and her article on Wells and nonsexuality is forthcoming in the Journal of Victorian Culture.

 

Panel 2.4: Romanticisms 

Sharon Ruston (Lancaster University), ‘Selected Poetry of Humphry Davy’

This paper will present new insights into the poetry of Sir Humphry Davy, drawing on discoveries made while editing a forthcoming selected edition of his verse, to be published open access by UCL Press. Although better known for his scientific achievements, Davy considered poetry central to his intellectual life, and the manuscripts of his personal notebooks reveal that Davy often worked hard at his poems sometimes revising them across decades. It is now possible to trace the development of his poems from first drafts to later revisions. These manuscripts, many previously overlooked or unpublished, show him returning to key poetic ideas and refining his style across his lifetime.

The paper will explore Davy’s creative process, the evolution of themes, imagery and topics, and the significance of scientific knowledge and concepts within his verse. It will also reflect on his early poetic collaboration with Robert Southey, especially in the context of poems selected and edited by Southey for The Annual Anthology. By analysing individual poems in manuscript alongside their published forms, and considering the material evidence of revision, this paper will argue for a new appreciation of Davy as a poet, and reflect on the wider value of editorial and archival work in re-evaluating Romantic-period science writing as literature.

Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism at Lancaster University. She was PI of the Davy Notebooks Project: https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/collections/davy/1. Her most recent book was The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (2021). She will co-general edit, with Daniel Cook, the 15 volume Collected Works of Mary Shelley (2025-35), and edit volume 2, the 1818 Frankenstein.

Jude Mahmoud (University of Oxford), ‘Voids and Vacuities: Newtonian Critique in William Blake’s Fall’

William Blake spent over two decades writing and rewriting mythological narratives of the Fall. Across these works, Eternal unity falls through a void, ending in the petrification of perception – what Blake identifies as ‘Single vision & Newtons sleep’ (Complete Poetry and Prose, 722). In The Book of Urizen (1794) alone, ‘Void’ appears twelve times, ‘Abyss’ six times, and ‘Vacuum once’, signalling the significance of empty space to his lapsarian narratives. Central to Isaac Newton’s thought was the notion that space is an infinite void containing only a minute proportion of matter. While much scholarship has been devoted to Blake’s engagement with Newton, the cosmogonical, lapsarian implications of ‘the Newtonian Voids between the Substances of Creation’ remain underexplored (318).

This paper argues that Blake reimagines chaos, which he figures as ‘Newtonian Voids’, as a product, not a precondition, of the Fall. For Blake, the notion that chaos precedes divine creation is itself a fallen misperception: voids emerge only when Eternal vision falls into material perception. Reading the lapsarian void as Blake’s mode of Newtonian critique, this paper reveals Newtonian space, ‘measured […] / In the horrid vacuity bottomless’, to be a central epistemological tenet of Blake’s Fall (92).

Jude Mahmoud is a researcher in William Blake who recently completed her PhD at the University of Oxford. She holds an MLitt in Romantic and Victorian Studies from the University of St Andrews and an undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford. Her research interests include prophecy, gender, time and space, and visual art.

Paul Hamann-Rose (University of Passau), ‘Innovation in The Athenaeum: John Aikin’s Editorial Aesthetics of Poetry and Natural History’

In 1777, John Aikin articulated a central eighteenth-century aesthetic in his essay The Application of Natural History to Poetry. Aikin advocates that poets embrace the new knowledge and language of botany, zoology and other fields of the slowly consolidating scientific disciplines to produce a new kind of poetry that is both more accurate in its observations, and aesthetically original. He also suggests that in this way poets could advance the science itself. Recent scholarship has emphasised the importance of Aikin’s treatise for paving the way for Romanticism’s environmental imagination, even if ‘scientific’ perspectives were outwardly often eschewed in the period. Besides promoting an early productive confluence of poetry and science, understood as related but increasingly distinct activities, Aikin’s text offers an illuminating discussion of the hierarchy of novelty and originality in the lead-up to the Romantic celebration of original genius. In this paper, I investigate this aesthetic philosophy in the context of Aikin’s long-standing role as editor of, first, The Monthly Magazine and then, from 1807-1809, of his own venture, The Athenaeum. I explore how the latter’s published poetry reflects Aikin’s earlier aesthetic and how the poetry’s proposed originality resonates with the periodical’s larger representation of invention, novelty and genius.

Paul Hamann-Rose is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Passau, Germany. His two principle areas of research are the legal and cultural construction of authorship across the new media landscapes of British Romanticism, as well as the interrelations between literature and genetic science. His book Genetics and the Novel: Reimagining Life Through Fiction came out in 2024 with Palgrave Macmillan. Other current publications include edited special issues on European Translations of Romanticism (ERR) and on Ecologies Below Ground: 1750-1850 (ISLE), both forthcoming in 2026.

Jo Hyang (Seoul National University), ‘The spiral tendency in Goethe’s botany and literature’

Goethe’s last botanical treatises refer to the so-called spiral tendency that can be observed in various plant areas. But even before he dealt with this phenomenon in his treatises, he had expressed it in his literary texts such as Hermann and Dorothea, Elective Affinities, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years and Faust II, etc., as a natural symbol for history and temporal change.
The question arises as to what these parallels between the plant and human realms might mean. Do they mean that humans are only a part of ‘nature’ and that both are ‘entangled’ with each other, as is claimed today from a new materialistic point of view, or that the same patterns can be recognized through human cognitive abilities – then, despite the discourse on nature, a humanistic, even anthropocentric view?
Furthermore, this paper explores the ontological and cosmological significance of this spiral, drawing upon Michel Serres’s study of Lucretius’s text.

Research Interests: Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, anthropocene discourses, posthumanism, Goethe and Weimar Classicism, Translation Theories, literature and science, intercultural literature, gender studies

A short bio:
● since March 2022 Assistant Professor at Seoul National University, Dep. of German Literature and Language, Seoul, Republic of Korea
● since March 2023 Adjunct Professor at Seoul National University, Dep. of Gender Studies
● since March 2023 Member of the Environmental Humanities Reading Group at Seoul National University
● 2023-2026 Vice-president of the Korean Goethe-Society
● 2025-2026 Vice-president of the Korean Kafka-Society
● 2007-2015 Ph. D Course at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany

 

Panel 2.5: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction

Megan Woodward (University of York), ‘Anthropocene sinthomosexuality in Ian McEwan’s Solar’

This paper proposes the figure of the ‘Anthropocene sinthomosexual’ through a close reading of Ian McEwan’s cli-fi novel Solar (2010). Where Lee Edelman originally conceptualised the sinthomosexual as the queer, antifuturist figure marginalised by his rejection of the deified Child-as-future, McEwan’s novel redefines sinthomosexuality as a symptom of the Anthropocene, a response to the confounding nature of climate science and the urgent interspecies responsibilities and more-than-human phenomena that it makes apparent. I locate the Anthropocene sinthomosexual in the novel’s protagonist, whose self-congratulatory non-parenthood is used to eschew ecological responsibility, to deny implication in an alarming environmental future. Indeed, this paper argues that while sinthomosexuality appears to gain new ethical salience in the Anthropocene through the ubiquity of environmental ethical models based on parental sentiment (‘Do it for the children!’), the antifuturism encoded in sinthomosexuality has ironically become less, rather than more, socially marginal. Reading Solar’s protagonist as an embodiment of the behaviours, ideas and systems that most acutely threaten the climate—including overconsumption, human exceptionalism and profit-driven scientific pursuit—this paper asks what it means that the antifuturism associated with sinthomosexuality has shifted into the mainstream of Anthropocene culture, and considers how we might rethink a future that urgently needs our care.

Megan Woodward is a PhD candidate at the University of York. Her project explores how the Child-as-future is manipulated in order to mediate the radically unknowable future in post-Thatcher Britain, as represented in the dystopian fictions of Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, P. D. James and Megan Hunter. She is particularly interested in how ideas surrounding the Child respond to emergent biotechnologies, Artificial Intelligence and global warming. Alongside her project, she is the administrator of the international research network ‘Reproduction and the Humanities’, funded by the Centre for Modern Studies at University of York, which aims to bring together humanities researchers working on themes relating to reproduction across a range of disciplines and from various geographical regions.

Nicole Brandstetter (University of Applied Sciences Munich, Germany), ‘Epistemological Failures in Contemporary Climate Fiction: Knowledge Without Transformation in Boyle, Flor, and Bjerg’

This paper examines how Boyle’s “Blue Skies” (2023), Flor’s “Ein kurzes Buch zum fröhlichen Untergang” (2025), and Bjerg’s “Der Vorweiner” (2023) represent the gap between climate science literacy and behavioural change. These novels depict characters who possess and accept scientific knowledge about climate catastrophe yet fail to act proportionately – demonstrating what sociologist Kari Norgaard terms “socially organized denial”. Drawing on science and technology studies, climate psychology, and sociology of knowledge, the paper analyses three distinct modes of epistemological failure: Boyle depicts normalization through adaptation or ignorance, where scientific information is acknowledged but neutralized through routinization or neglect; Flor presents ironic resignation, where climate science is accepted but framed as requiring no response; Bjerg literalizes anticipatory grief as profession, commodifying the emotional processing of scientific predictions about loss. The analysis reveals that climate change poses not merely an information problem but a crisis of so-called “actionable knowledge”. These novels suggest that the relationship between science and society is mediated by psychological defenses, structural constraints, and affective strategies that prevent scientific consensus from catalysing transformation. By representing knowledgeable yet passive characters, these texts offer illustrations why scientific literacy could prove insufficient to address the need for action in times of climate crisis.

Nicole Brandstetter studied English and French literature and language at the University of Regensburg (Germany) and the Université de la Bretagne Occidentale / Brest (France). After her studies, while obtaining her doctorate, she worked in an interdisciplinary research group in a graduate programme on the analysis of aesthetic lies. In 2005, she gained her PhD in Romance studies (French literature) on the topic of strategies of stage-managed inauthenticity in the postmodern French novel. After that, she worked as PR manager and in a private educational institute. In September 2015, she was appointed professor for English at the University of Applied Sciences Munich (Germany). Her areas of expertise and research interests are narratives in times of digitalisation, AI, and climate crisis as well as concepts of (in)authenticity in literature.

Anton Kirchhofer (Oldenburg) and Anna Auguscik (Bremen), ‘Alien Expeditions? Practice, Calculation and the Expedition Narrative in Contemporary Speculative Fiction’

In this contribution we focus our shared concern with the expedition narrative in literary fiction on the special crosscurrents between conflicting expeditionary endeavours in science fiction and speculative fiction. The presentation will discuss three recent fictional narratives in which scientific expedition teams appear to encounter or be exposed to ‘alien’ expeditionary practices. Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998/2002), Peter Watts’ Blindsight (2006) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihiliation (2014) each revolve around expeditions which are prompted by indications or evidence of ‘alien’ presence. In each case, though, the expedition teams find themselves faced with the unsettling possibility of becoming objects to a prior expedition undertaken by unknown alien entities, and being subjected to the extractive sampling and experimentation conventionally reserved for the places and communities which the expeditioners encounter and examine. At the same time neither the scientific characters nor the narrative voices have any access to potential scientific rationales underlying the practices they are exposed to—they are, in Bruno Latour’s terms, excluded from the ‘centres of calculation’ which also form essential components of scientific expeditionary practice. Our contribution will analyse the specific constellations of narrative patterns, narrative perspectives, and scientific expeditionary practices, that shape the fictional imaginations of intersecting expeditionary trajectories in science fiction and speculative fiction.

Anton Kirchhofer is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oldenburg. His research has focused on literature in its discursive environments, including the narrative dimensions of new formations and functions of sexual knowledge in eighteenth-century fiction (in his Ph.D. dissertation), and on periodical criticism and the history of critical discourse in the nineteenth century (as his postdoctoral dissertation). He is one of the founding directors of the Fiction Meets Science research group (www.fictionmeetsscience.org), and has published widely on aspects of science and narrative, most recently the co-edited volume Science, Culture, and Postcolonial Narratives (https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.1126).

Anna Auguscik is a lecturer in English Literature and Culture at the University of Bremen. As a Fiction Meets Science (FMS) research fellow she completed a project on the media presence of the science novel and is currently working on scientific expedition narratives with Anton Kirchhofer.

Bidisha Nandi (University of Strathclyde), ‘Nature’s In(ter)vention: Gothic Doubles and the Ecological Uncanny’

Freud’s ‘uncanny’ describes the return of what we’ve repressed; in environmental terms, what returns is what we’ve tried to exile as “nature”. Focusing on The Southern Reach Series, this paper will read VanderMeer’s ‘gothic’ figures – contaminated bodies, bureaucratic parasites, temporal recursions – as a symbolic apparatus for narrating the uncanny return of environmental entanglement we’ve fiercely denied. Building on ecogothic studies and trans-corporeal theory, the study will examine three modalities of doubling as forms of environmental horror. First, the Biologist and Ghost Bird literalize trans-corporeality: bodies as permeable membranes infiltrated by non-human agencies. Ghost Bird’s ambiguous status – neither original nor copy – undermines the logic by which institutional power categorises nature as knowable, manageable ‘Other’. Second, the Southern Reach organization becomes the bureaucratic unconscious of Area X and thus, the institution designed to contain wildness instead replicates its logic and becomes wild itself. This structural mimicry reveals that surveillance infrastructures cannot observe without being transformed, such that the apparatus of control becomes indistinguishable from what it attempts to master. Again, the proliferation of doubles across the series- tower/tunnel, falsified journals, replicated expeditions, and temporal paradoxes where effects precede causes – constitutes “ecological recursion”. The paper will also contend that VanderMeer’s Gothic operates as an environmental sensorium, where transformation isn’t contamination but acknowledgement of our ecological imbrication.

Bidisha joined the University of Strathclyde as a PhD student in January 2026. Her work focuses on the exploration of posthuman horror in Popular Fiction. She holds a master’s degree in English literature from Banaras Hindu University, India. Her research interests include posthumanism, environmental humanities, plant humanities, disability studies, and new materialism. As a novice researcher, she is eager to engage with the academic community, learn from others and share her own research.

 

Panel 2.6: Literature and Science on Screen

Laura Kremmel (Niagara University), ‘Showing Your Age: Medical Examination in Elder Horror’

There has been a noticeable rise in “elder horror” fiction and film, particularly works set in nursing homes and care facilities for older populations and those with dementia (Miller and Van Riper, 2019). These texts channel cultural anxieties about declining bodies and minds by depicting older people as at once disturbingly vulnerable and threateningly monstrous. They reproduce experiences of isolation, confusion, and fear resulting from advanced aging without social safety nets. The contradictions inherent in elder horror perpetuate old age as both Other and inevitable.

This presentation combines the health humanities, dementia studies, disability studies, and Gothic studies to dissect a specific recurring scene in elder horror: the medical examination. I investigate the contraries of these scenes at a health moment of what Arthur Frank calls “Narrative Wreck”, a dismantling of personal narrative map (Frank 1997): humanization and dehumanization, care and violence, certainty and ambiguity, and the uncanny elements of the familiar and strange. Texts such as The Rule of Jenny Pen, The Manor, Relic, We Spread, and The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre reveal both the need for medical care and the medical exam’s power to rewrite embodied identities at a critical age.

Dr. Laura Kremmel is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Niagara University. Her research is focused on creating conversations between Gothic Studies and the Health Humanities across a range of time periods, with particular focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature. Her recent publications and projects have expanded to include the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as COVID-19 introduced renewed interests and anxieties in public health and medicine.

Zixin Yan (University of Leeds), ‘Listening, Silence, and Montage: Translating Mother–Daughter Interviews into Experimental Video Installation’

This paper examines how contemporary moving-image works negotiate traumatised mother–daughter relationships in the context of Chinese patriarchy, reading film and video as laboratories for competing knowledges of care. Focusing on my practice-based PhD projects alongside selected Chinese-language films that foreground intimate domestic conflict, I explore how cinematic form registers the entanglement of Confucian filial ethics with psychiatric and psychotherapeutic discourses of trauma, attachment, and intergenerational transmission. Combining close formal analysis (shot duration, montage, voice-over, and screen-within-screen recording) with insights from affect theory and family psychology, I argue that these works stage mothers and daughters as co-produced by scientific and quasi-scientific languages—diagnosis, “toxic parenting,” trauma scales—while also resisting their classificatory violence. The paper asks what kinds of evidence moving images offer for everyday, gendered experiences that often fall between medical humanities case studies and sociological data. By placing experimental film practice in dialogue with the sciences of emotion and memory, I propose “matrilineal domination” as a heuristic for understanding how care, harm, and obligation are redistributed across generations on screen.

Zixin Yan is a practice-based PhD researcher in the School of Design at the University of Leeds. Their work combines experimental video installation, autoethnography, and feminist theory to examine traumatised mother–daughter relationships within contemporary Chinese patriarchy. Drawing on film studies, affect theory, and the medical humanities, Yan’s research explores how moving images can register and reconfigure intergenerational trauma, care, and domination

Tom Hedley (Université libre de Bruxelles), ‘Hilbert’s Hotel Revisited: Turning Topologically with F.W. Murnau’s “Der letzte Mann” and Vicki Baum’s “Menschen im Hotel”’

In a 1925 lecture entitled “Über das Unendliche” (On the Infinite), the celebrated Göttingen mathematician and figurehead of mathematical modernism, David Hilbert, used the analogy of a grand hotel with infinitely many rooms to illustrate the paradoxical nature of transfinite set theory. Now a century on, this paper foregrounds the preoccupation with the space of the grand hotel in the modernist cultural imaginary to elicit formal and aesthetic parallels between modern mathematics and German-language modernism. To do so, I draw upon the “impeccably modernist” field of mathematical topology (Gray 2008), which examines invariant spatial properties within processes of transformation, to “re-read” two focal works that have been cast by critical consensus as displays of unrelenting metamorphosis: F.W. Murnau’s 1924 film “Der letzte Mann” (The Last Man) and Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel “Menschen im Hotel” (Grand Hotel). Murnau and Baum, I maintain, construct in their hotel stories spatialities along much more topological lines, by which hidden invariant structures that resist processes of change come to the fore — both within the self and turbulent modern society. Building on recent scholarship that recognizes how cognitively innate mathematical knowledge can be expressed implicitly, indirectly and by “untaught” cultural actors (Tubbs 2014; Jenkins 2021), this paper thus seeks to widen the domain of “literature and mathematics”, both in terms of the forms of expression it can assume and the writers and artists it can entail.

Tom Hedley (he/him) is currently a FNRS-funded postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in German literature at the ULB in Brussels, where he researches entanglements of literary and scientific cultures and networks in Viennese modernism. He competed his PhD on mathematical and cultural modernism in a German-language context at Trinity College Dublin in 2024, which was funded by the Irish Research Council.

Peter Sands (University of York), ‘Bugonia and Paranoid Environmentalism’

In Yorgos Lanthimos’s dark comedy film Bugonia (2025), the conspiratorial environmentalist Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) kidnaps Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a pharmaceutical company and, in Teddy’s eyes, member of an alien species responsible for the demise of Earth’s honeybees. Teddy’s paranoid delusions satirise the shift in American environmental politics towards what Holly Jean Buck has dubbed ‘para-environmentalism,’ the movement that, via fears surrounding technologies such as geoengineering, hark back to old school visions of purity and wilderness while complicating the distinction between classical environmental politics and an incipient ecofascism. This paper uses Lanthimos’s film to historicise the shift towards a new mode of paranoid environmentalism that reconfigures Cold War narratives about ubiquitous toxicity and extinction risk towards new forms of denialism that occur in uncomfortable proximity to mainstream environmentalist concerns. Situating this shift via a series of other voices, including director Todd Haynes and writer Joy Williams, it argues that appeals to environmental postcritique in recent ecocriticism risk invalidating the lessons learned from histories of environmental toxicity in the late-twentieth century. It questions how Lanthimos’s film — and its unlikely representation of the politics of truth in the context of para-environmentalism — thematises the failure of post-Cold War liberalism.

Peter joined the University of York in 2022 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity. Peter’s research focuses on the representation of nonhuman animals in 20th and 21st century American and British literature. More broadly, his interests include the relationship between literature and science, Cold War culture, animals and cinema, environmental techno-cultures, posthumanism, and critical theory.

Friday

 Panel 3.1: Medico-Literary Hybridity in the Nineteenth Century 

Megan Coyer (University of Glasgow), ‘Private Practices: Medical Fiction and the Manuscript Medical Casebook’

When Samuel Warren’s fictive series, Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician, was published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine between 1830 and 1837, it was presented as based on an actual diary by the eponymous ‘late physician’, edited by an unnamed individual for the lay public. Warren (who was not a physician) was eventually required to declare his sole authorship of work in 1837, due to legal proceedings against those who were pirating his work. The influential series initiated the ‘case structure’ that we typically associate with later nineteenth-century detective fiction (Worthington 2005: 46), and foundational work has focused on how the series, with its affective excesses, departs from the rhetorical norms of the published medical case histories of the period (Kennedy 2004). In this paper, I analyse this hybrid medico-literary series specifically in relation to the manuscript medical casebook for private practice, building upon Courtney E. Thompson’s framing of the (unpublished) manuscript casebook as a dually epistemic and ‘affective genre’ (2022). In this reading, Warren’s series becomes a fictional reflection (albeit still amplified and excessive) of genuine practices of emotional self-management discernible in the medical archive.

Eeva Savolainen (University of Stirling), ‘“Can I describe what I saw!”: Diagnostic Horror in “The Thunder-Struck—The Boxer”’

Picture the following: A young woman is paralysed. The doctor is ignorant of the cause. All he can do is open his textbooks, compare diagnostic taxonomies, and witness his patient’s decline. Samuel Warren’s short story “The Thunder-Struck—The Boxer” (September 1832) paints this dramatic scene in one of his fictional case histories, published as a part of Passages. This paper investigates medico-literary hybridity in this popular short story to determine one influential pre-Victorian author’s anxious response to the multiplication of diagnostic frameworks at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this tale, Warren devotes a page and a half to references to, and direct quotations from, influential nosological texts by medical writers such as William Cullen, Gottfried van Swieten, John Jebb, and Jacques Henri Désiré Petetin as the late physician is struggling to diagnose and treat his patient. As this paper will argue, Warren employs diagnostic intertextuality to achieve what Chris Baldick has described as a typical destination of Gothic plots, namely a ‘sickening descent into disintegration’ (2009: xix).

Mila Daskalova (University of Glasgow), ‘From Case Notes to Memoirs: The Nineteenth-Century Alienist as a Biographer’

In 1878 the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology published a series of biographical sketches titled ‘Mad Poets’. Penned by influential British alienist, William A. F. Browne, it promised to explore the connections between the imagination, genius, and insanity. Such studies constituted a distinct, popular medico-literary genre ‘drawn increasingly not from clinical observation but from the general sphere of literary production and reception’ (Whitehead 2017: 96). However, one entry in Browne’s list of mad poets stands out. Nestled among the likes of Coleridge, Clare, Poe, Tasso, and Schiller is Henry Scott Riddell—a Scottish poet of relatively limited fame whom Browne had treated at the Crichton Asylum in Dumfries nearly forty years earlier. Tracing the development of Browne’s narration of Ridell’s life from the casebooks to the ‘Mad Poets’ sketches, this paper explores the blending of clinical notes, personal acquaintance and literary tropes and texts in the portrayal of the patient as a neglected genius poet saved from both madness and obscurity by the physician-biographer. Furthermore, it suggests that the nineteenth-century turn to what Juliette Atkinson terms ‘“hidden” lives’ in biographical writing had a broader influence on psychiatric practice (2010: 37).

Panel 3.2: What Can Poetry Do? 

Amna Umer Cheema (University of the Punjab/University of Sheffield), ‘How does Elizabeth Bishop think Blue? A Hydrocene Reading of “The Map”’

This paper offers a hydrocene reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Map,” arguing that the poem enunciates a blue ontology and curatorial pedagogy. Bishop’s ‘thinking with water’ anticipates twenty-first-century practices in arts-based planetary caretaking by making poetic attention itself a mode of ecological stewardship, one that is grounded in proximity, humility, and responsiveness. Reading the poem as a hydro-artistic work, the analysis foregrounds hybridity, Lagrangian motion, and a wet ontology in which water’s mixtures and membranes of differences reshape how bodies, knowledge, and political relations are imagined. Bishop reframes cartography from an instrument of terrestrial mastery into a surface of exchange where land and sea co-produce one another, where names run into the water, and shorelines function as membranes of difference. The sea is presented not as a distant object to be restored, but as a condition that must be lived through. In this reframing, the sea is never pure, but always a mixture whose iterations produce distinct textures, viscosities, and social genealogies. A hydrocene approach reframes the poem’s cartography as curatorial practice, insisting that water is never pure but always hybrid, that repetition in watery systems is divergence rather than sameness, and that poetic attention can enact forms of planetary care.

Amna Umer Cheema is an Associate Professor of English at the Institute of English Studies, University of the Punjab, Pakistan. She earned her PhD in modern American poetry from the University of Leeds, UK. Currently, she is an Academic Visitor at the School of English, University of Sheffield, UK. Her areas of interest include Modern American poetry, Digital and Medical Humanities, Hydrofeminism, and Fluid mechanics. She is the first Pakistani academic to introduce teaching and research in Digital and Medical Humanities in a Pakistani University.

Emilie Walezak (Nantes Université), ‘Repurposing Natural History: Poetic Experiments vis-à-vis the Procedural Methods of Natural Sciences’

In her latest Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene from 2024, Anna Tsing encourages readers to “revitalize” (7) natural history and repurpose its protocols of observation from a decolonial perspective in order to offer alternative paths than those of modelling tools and satellite bigdata to better apprehend Anthropocenic phenomena. Similarly, in her 2019 Living as a Bird, philosopher Vinciane Despret contrasts the methods of amateur bird-watching based on local, daily surveys with reductionist models of bird behaviour. The regeneration of natural history is not the sole purview of the epistemology and philosophy of sciences but also characterizes the hybrid formats of new nature writing. This paper will focus, in particular, on the early poetic works of Elizabeth Jane-Burnett, Swims (2017), and Of Sea (2021), to evidence her personal and phenomenological reinterpretation of the methods of naturalist observation aimed at pluralising environmentalist approaches to habitats. Using her own swimming body for “fieldwork exercise”, with her hair acting as “indicator species” (Of Sea, 78), and mobilising stylistic devices such as prosopopoeia or topography, Burnett redirects the procedures of the life sciences – observation and description – to ask the question: “what more could we be sharing, the scientists and poets?” (Twelve Words for Moss, 85).

Emilie Walezak is a Professor of English Literature at Nantes Université. A specialist of contemporary British women’s writing and ecocriticism, she is the author of Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing. Realism, Feminism, Materialism, Bloomsbury 2021, and “A. S. Byatt, Science and the Mind/Body Dilemma”, Journal of Literature and Science, Volume 11, Issue 1, 10th Anniversary Issue, July 2018. She has coordinated the Master’s degree in Environmental Humanities at Nantes Université for the past three years.

Ralph O’Connor (University of Aberdeen), ‘Beyond the “Great Sea-Dragons”: Thomas Hawkins and the Miltonic Gothic

Thomas Hawkins’s chief claim to fame is as the eccentric West Country fossil collector whose beautifully preserved specimens of extinct marine reptiles form the jewel in the crown of the Natural History Museum’s collection in London. He also had ambitions as a man of letters, and his two palaeontological treatises – Memoirs of Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri and The Book of the Great Sea-Dragons – achieved some notoriety in the early Victorian period for their heaven-storming blend of technical description with Promethean self-dramatization and Gothic fantasy. By the 1840s, however, Hawkins had turned to epic poetry to express with more freedom his speculations about pre-human cosmic history while also displaying his knowledge about natural history. The result was two scientifically seasoned monster epics, The Wars of Jehovah and The Christiad, the focus of this paper. They read like an attempt by William McGonagall to rewrite Paradise Lost with the help of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Attention to their diction, style and tentacled dramatis personae allows a new appreciation of the role of Milton’s Paradise Lost in mediating visions of deep time long before the rise of weird fiction.

Ralph is Professor in the Literature and Culture of Britain, Ireland & Iceland at the University of Aberdeen. His research currently falls into four linked areas: mediaeval Celtic literature, mediaeval Icelandic and Scandinavian literature, modern history of science, and literary history c. 1750-1920.

 

Panel 3.3: Religion and Science 

Emilie Taylor-Pirie (University of Birmingham), ‘“Relenting God”: faith, science, and belief in turn-of-the-century medical poetry’

In 1925 a new English hymn book called Songs of Praise was published. It was intended to be a ‘national collection of hymns to be used in public worship’ for church services, lectures, public meetings, and, particularly, for use in schools. Amongst the hymns now familiar to English school children such as Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, and Rossetti’s ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, was a hymn called ‘Science’, written by Nobel-prize winning scientist, Sir Ronald Ross. Ross’s hymn sang the praise of science as Divinely ordained, exclaiming: “Before thy feet I fall/Lord, who made high my fate/for in the mighty small/thou show’st the mighty great”. These lines were written alongside his research on the malaria parasite and are inflected by the tribulations of experimental microscopy. Here, and elsewhere, Ross claims religious patrimony with ‘relenting God’ bestowing ‘victory’ upon him.
Throughout his career, public school science masters and Christian ministers alike appealed to Ross as a figurehead for the reconciliation of science and religion. Nevertheless, Ross’s own Christian faith was often at odds with a more pantheistic belief in the power of Nature, and an investment in the symbolic value of the gods of Greek mythology. Although certainly informed by his religious beliefs, Ross’s invocation of a Christian Divine sponsor was likely also a political move to protect his claim to priority by rejecting the mentorship of fellow scientists. In this paper I investigate how Ross’s engagement with Divinity through the poetic illuminates the contours of faith, belief, and science at the turn of the twentieth century.

Emilie Taylor-Pirie is a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests include tropical medicine, gut health, the medical humanities and the public understanding of science. Her first book “Empire Under the Microscope” won the BSLS 2022 Book Prize.

Jenni Halpin (Savannah State University), ‘Letting Light Shine for Catholic Robots and Agnostic Scientists’

Using Carl Sagan’s novel Contact to articulate some convergences and conflicts between the practices of science and of religion in literature, I intend to develop my main focus on Clifford D. Simak’s Project Pope, the story of a colony of robots on a planet called End of Nothing in the city of Vatican-17. These robots are practicing Catholics, working on a space exploration project to find Heaven and also programming a computer Pope. Their search for illumination (as knowledge about space and as papal infallibility) contrasts with the space race in Contact pursuing, in most obvious part, being first. The purpose driving a discovery process (the robots and the crew in Contact both going out to have a look at space, for example) not only informs the shape of that process but also informs the perception of the reliability of the outcomes of the process. Considering these interrelations, I shall be unpacking the structures of authority and effects of aura (in Walter Benjamin’s sense) as they support, change, and impede the scientific pursuit of religious goals.

Jenni’s current main research project involves the productive intersection of two interdisciplinary fields: science and literature and science and religion. Her ongoing research agenda includes science fiction and science drama as well as her core work in science and literary studies. She is a professor of English with teaching responsibilities primarily in composition. Jenni also edits the BSLS Newsletter.

Sofie Vandepitte (KU Leuven – Universiteit Gent), ‘The (Divine) Natural World in the Belgian Children’s Magazines Zonneland and Petits belges’

Two of the longest-running twentieth-century Belgian children’s magazines, Zonneland and its sister publication Petits belges entertained child readers from 1920 onwards, only ceasing publication in 2024. Published under the auspices of the Norbertine monks of the abbey of Averbode, the magazines served as the main propaganda channels of the Evangelical Crusade, a religious movement whose Belgian centre of operations was the abbey of Averbode. This Catholic framework was particularly evident in the periodicals’ early years, though a religious atmosphere continued to permeate the magazines well into the second half of the twentieth century. Besides the many articles on the Evangelical Crusade, Zonneland and Petits belges featured fiction and, to a lesser extent, educational texts on a variety of topics, the most popular of which was the natural world. In my talk, I will analyse how Zonneland and Petits belges discussed nature, with a particular eye for the ways in which the periodicals’ Catholic ideology shaped their discourse. Given that the magazines were not identical – Zonneland was directly managed by the abbey, while Petits belges was outsourced to a secular editor – I will also examine whether the magazines differed in how they taught the child reader about the natural world.

Sofie Vandepitte is doing a joint doctoral degree at KU Leuven-Universiteit Gent, as part of a project on Belgian children’s magazines published between 1919-1949. From November 2021 to October 2024, she served as pedagogical assistant in the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research interests include the periodical press, comic illustration, and gender-oriented literary analysis.

 

Panel 3.4: Memoirs/Memory 

Caitlin Kawalek (University of Cambridge), ‘Wandering from the ‘Beaten Track’: Laetitia Pilkington, Aesthetic Error, and Predictive Processing’

This paper brings Predictive Processing (PP)—a major cognitive scientific framework—into dialogue with c18th literary form. PP models cognition as a hierarchical Bayesian process in which the brain continually generates predictions and updates them in response to ‘prediction errors’. Although influential in philosophy of mind and aesthetics, PP’s engagement within literary studies is limited, its major treatment undertaken by Karin Kukkonen who deems c18th literature, influenced by ‘vraisemblance’, to be particularly pertinent to PP. Kukkonen aligns PP uncritically with 4E approaches; yet its structured account of cognition offers transformative ways of thinking about how readers navigate disruption, uncertainty and interpretive labour.

The paper proposes that Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs (1748) constitutes a compelling opportunity for thinking about narrative through PP. The text produces moments of formal instability that function as prediction errors for readers, compelling continual recalibration of generic expectations, moral priors and assumptions about decorum. Contextualising these effects within c18th debates about ‘error’, the paper traces Pilkington’s movement from moralised ‘fault’ toward epistemic errancy. Through this, the paper argues that the Memoirs underscores both the affordances and caveats of PP for literary criticism: while the text resonates with PP, it resists the stabilising tendencies of conservative approaches in favour of the generative potential of experiencing error.

Caitlin Kawalek is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her research concerns the predictive dynamics of reading and the ways that literary form engages the concepts of surprise, surmise, novelty and error. By placing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature in conversation with evolving aesthetic strands of predictive processing theory, her work explores how literary form illuminates, and complicates, contemporary models of cognition. Having worked in partnerships at Tate, Caitlin’s professional background is the arts sector. She has previously presented at BARS and is Editor for The Camera, a Cambridge-based arts and cultural review.

Harley Ryley (University of Sheffield), ‘The Memoirist’s Guide to Memory Science: problematising memory concepts to unlock deeper autobiographical truths’

Despite memory being the core material of the memoir writer, most commercially published memoir writing guides for aspiring writers (‘handbooks’) present it as a singular, simplistic concept: you simply have a good memory or you have not. Karr demonstrates this in The Art of Memoir, suggesting anyone with a bad memory should give up before starting, and in Write it All Down, Rentzenbrink states as a fact that there are no untruths in her writing. This purist approach to memory neglects to consider the multiple conceptualisations of the term ‘memory’, which can be drawn from neuroscience, psychology and philosophy.

In this paper, I will argue that singularising memory stifles the writer, narrows the memoir form and distorts truth by silencing common neurological phenomena such as incomplete memory or the impact of trauma. Through memoirs like Ashworth’s Notes Made While Falling and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and the work of psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers such as Kotre, Tulving and Aristotle, I will demonstrate how memoirists can draw from cross-disciplinary conceptualisations of memory to access deeper meaning within their work. I will then share practical examples of how memoirists can utilise scientific concepts of memory as tools for writing.

Harley Ryley is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis will develop an innovative approach to writing memoir which exposes language constructs, challenges concepts of truth and unwrites genre rules established within commercially published writing handbooks. She also freelances as a mentor for aspiring writers and is the Business Manager for, and runs writing workshops with, The Writers Workshop in Sheffield.

Hyeonsu Kim (Chungbuk National University, Korea), ‘Beyond Resolution: Trauma as Disability in The Perks of Being a Wallflower’

This paper challenges the conventional demand for healing by questioning whether the expectation that remembering trauma must lead to resolution is, itself, a subtle form of violence rooted in medical and therapeutic discourse. Stephen Chbosky’s 1999 young adult novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, subverts this narrative. Drawing on disability studies, this paper argues that the novel portrays trauma not as a resolvable obstacle but as a psychosocial disability that becomes integral to the protagonist’s identity. Charlie’s ‘wallflower’ status is analyzed as a social disability constructed through peer pressure and isolation. Drawing on Freud’s theory of “screen memory” and LaFarge’s interpretation of it, this paper examines the novel’s epistolary form as more than a therapeutic exercise. Charlie’s letters function as a complex “act of remembering”—an attempt to articulate his fragmented voice within silence, ultimately reclaiming authorship over his own story. By compelling readers to listen to this unresolved narrative, the text resists the conventional “promise of resolution.” It suggests that healing is not about ‘fixing’ but about learning to live alongside the damage.

Hyeonsu Kim is a first-year Master’s student in the Department of English Language and Literature at Chungbuk National University, affiliated with the BK21 FOUR project team. Her primary research interests include media studies, dystopian literature, and the exploration of human value and identity within film. She particularly focuses on the impact of social utility as a criterion on individual lives and subjectivity, conducting research that offers a critical perspective through film text analysis. Recently, she has been dedicated to reinterpreting character choices in films from the perspectives of disability theory and existential ethics.

 

Panel 3.5: Temporality 

Jaroslav Kušnír (University of Presov, Slovakia), ‘Science, Technology and Literature in Charles Yu´s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe’

In his novel, Charles Yu uses science fiction and postmodern narrative strategies to construct a protagonist—also named Charles Yu—who works as a time machine technician. This character travels through time machines, repairing them for others, while simultaneously attempting to reconcile with his father, a failed scientist who was never able to invent a functioning time machine. The narrative structure is further complicated by a time loop in which Charles writes a book that contains himself as a character, thereby collapsing temporal distinctions and situating the narrative in a perpetual present. Within this framework, technology—in the form of time machines—becomes both a means of manipulating temporality and a metaphor for the unstable boundaries between past, present, and future. The novel thus blurs the distinctions between reality and fantasy, dream and imagination, as well as science and belief.
Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra, alongside other critical perspectives, this paper examines Yu’s use of postmodern narrative devices such as metafiction and intertextuality. It will demonstrate how, when combined with science fiction conventions, these strategies highlight the ambivalent and often negative role of technology in contemporary society and its capacity to shape, distort, and manipulate human perceptions of reality. Ultimately, Yu’s novel illustrates how immersion in a technologically mediated environment may contribute to the dehumanization of the individual.

Jaroslav Kušnír is a professor of American, Australian and English literatures at the University of Prešov, Slovakia, where he teaches such courses as American literature, British literature, Australian short story, literary theory and criticism. His research includes American postmodern and contemporary fiction, Australian postmodern and comtemporary fiction, and critical reception of American, British and Australian literature in Slovakia. He is the author of Poetika americkej postmodernej prózy (Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme)[Poetics of American Postmodern Fiction: Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme]. Prešov, Slovakia: Impreso, 2001; American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction. Stuttgart, Germany: Ibidem, 2005; and Australian Literature in Contexts. Banská Bystrica,Slovakia: Trian, 2003; Postmodernism and after: new sensibility, media, pop culture, and communication technologies in anglophone literatures. Nitra:ASPA, 2015;and Kušnír, J., Blahút, M., Pavlinská, J. Regional and Ethnic Identities in Anglophone literatures. Nitra: SlovakEdu, 2023.

Piotr Czerwiński (Rzeszów University of Technology, Poland), ‘Exploring the Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Consciousness in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital’

This paper offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, examining how the novel frames consciousness as an extended, dynamic phenomenon embedded in spacetime and technological environments. Integrating literary, philosophical, cognitive, and quantum perspectives, it explores how the novel challenges models of consciousness that overlook spatial and temporal dependencies. Set aboard an international space station, Orbital positions human consciousness within a liminal setting where the loss of earthly temporal anchors destabilizes mental coherence. This mirrors the “extended mind,” in which cognition is distributed across individuals and their environments, and aligns with Nigel Thrift’s “technological unconscious,” as the astronauts’ perceptions merge with the systems sustaining them. The novel also contrasts Cartesian dualism with alternative models of mind. Its multiperspectival narrative reflects theoretical multiplicity, prompting readers to reconsider observation and interpretation in the collapse of subjective and objective realities. By depicting time as fundamental to consciousness, Harvey foregrounds its role in tethering the self to spacetime amid disorienting orbital cycles. Ultimately, Orbital presents consciousness as an emergent property shaped by embodiment, environment, and temporality, offering valuable insights into contemporary debates on the nature of mind and reality.

Dr. Piotr Czerwiński is the author of the Technological Unconscious in Contemporary Fiction in English (2023). Piotr’s research explores the intersections of science, technology, and consciousness in contemporary fiction in English, with particular focus on how technological advances shape narrative structures and representations of subjectivity.

Kate Foster (University of Reading), ‘“Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says”: Clocks, Time Travel and Albert Einstein in Early-Twentieth Century Fiction’

A village cricket match is thrown into chaos when a bizarre visitor from the future – his mind rewired by a clock implanted in his brain – stumbles onto the field in E. V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man (1923). This Clockwork Man hails from a time when everyone lives in a boundless virtual reality multiverse, free to move in any direction at any moment – yet, paradoxically, his behaviour still depends on a clock that must be physically wound. What does this incongruity reveal about cultural discourses of time in the early twentieth century?

Time has long been linked to notions of virtue and self-restraint, and pressure to make the most of the time available continued into the modern era, intensified by developments including Einstein’s special relativity in 1905, alongside debates on energy and the human-machine relationship which played out in the writings of Henri Bergson (1907), F. W. Taylor (1911) and Jules Amar (1913). Odle’s characters invoke Einstein several times in the text with varying degrees of insight. This paper asks: how does Odle’s imagined future, and his depiction of 1920s’ attitudes to time, draw on Einstein’s revolutionary ideas which, as Randall Stevenson suggests, seemed to promise liberation from ‘conventional, measured temporality’?

Kate Foster is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Reading, and Conference Officer for the Society for French Studies. She is the co-editor of The Human and the Machine in Literature in Culture (Routledge, 2025), and her monograph Androids, Cyborgs and Humanoid Bodies in Modernity is under contract with Liverpool University Press. Kate is developing a new project on technology, disease and cultural history.

 

Panel 3.6: What Does this Text Know? 

Caspar Wort (Loughborough University), ‘Formulations: Scientific Verse as High-Context Poetics’

In his plenary at the 2025 BSLS Conference, Professor Michael Whitworth asked us to consider “What does the poem know?” Continuing with a discussion of the epistemology of poetics, I propose to ask not what the poem knows, but rather “what does the poem expect the reader to know?”
In this paper, I will explore this connection between the content of poems inspired by scientific concepts and the knowledge base(s) of readers in different interpretive communities (Fish, 1980), namely those who possess the information the poem “expects the reader to know” and those who do not. Using Formulations, a 2022 co-authored collection of poetry by Miranda Lynn Barnes and Stephen Paul Wren which takes inspiration from organic chemical compounds for both form and language choice, I will explore how readers with or without the relevant knowledge will interpret and interact with a science-poem in different ways. In doing so, I will conceive of the science-poem as an example of high-context poetry, a category developed through my ongoing research (contrasted with low- and mid-context poetry) which requires the reader to have specialist extant knowledge which cannot be adequately outlined within the text of a poem.

Caspar Wort is a poet and doctoral researcher at Loughborough University. His research interests are reader-response, scientific approaches to the study of literature (and poetry in particular), and the intersection of scientific concepts with poetry.

Adele Guyton (UCLouvain), ‘What Science Fiction’s Plots Don’t Know About Scientific Methods’

Building on scholarship on science fiction’s appearance of rationality, this paper argues that the SF adventure plot–exemplified by the space opera–routinely privileges applied over theoretical sciences, practice over theory. In the first part of the paper, I read fiction by Max Valier and Clark Ashton Smith, who exemplify the range from rationalistic to Weird space opera in early science fiction. I suggest that across the spectrum of SF aesthetics, knowledge of outer space is figured as relying on the unique experiences of explorer characters rather than being derivable from instrument readings or replicable experimentation. In the second part of the paper, I draw a comparison between early science fiction’s “boots on the ground” exploration and contemporary popular science narratives of Mars colonisation. To conclude, I suggest that the theory/praxis opposition is deeply embedded in the SF imaginary and has influenced pro-Mars writings to centre more straightforward issues of engineering over messy questions of biology.

Adele Guyton is a postdoctoral fellow of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) based at UCLouvain with a project on contemporary alternate history fiction. She completed her PhD at KU Leuven in April 2025. Her writing has appeared in venues such as the Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Popular Fictions, C21 Literature.

Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow), ‘What does this poem know about maths, and when does it know it?’

In this paper I’ll do some close reading of three nineteenth-century English poems, using them to explore and adapt the fertile and fascinating question Michael Whitworth posed in his BSLS keynote lecture last year – ‘what does this poem know?’. I’ll argue that asking this question and targeting mathematical knowledge gives rather different results from asking it about other kinds of scientific knowledge. I’ll also be investigating whether it demands a rather different methodology. Some of the basic assumptions we typically use in literature and science studies about the ways in which Victorian readers accessed, interpreted and responded to scientific knowledge do not hold for mathematics. For one thing, in their most elementary forms, mathematical concepts were more widely spread through all classes of nineteenth-century society than any other kind of knowledge. Access to these basic concepts was often a result of experiential rather than formal learning. How does experiential knowledge of this kind show up in poetry, and how easy is it to recognise it if it’s widespread, normalised, and rarely examined? In this paper I’ll try to use Michael’s question to try to pinpoint some of the ways in which literature and science methodologies do and don’t work for literature and maths studies, and what that tells us about our distinctive practices.

Alice Jenkins is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow. She works on the emergence of knowledge economies in the nineteenth century and on literature and mathematics, particularly Euclidean geometry. She is the author of Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850 (2007), editor of Michael Faraday’s Mental Exercises (2008), and a co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics (2021). She is also, with Sharon Ruston and Jessica Howell, a co-editor of the Palgrave series Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine.

Panel 4.1: Emerging Technologies: Artificial Women and Virtual Realities in Contemporary Science Fiction 

Eleanor McAdam (University of Liverpool), ‘Outsourcing Motherhood: Artificial Mothers in science fiction literature’

Ectogenesis has been widely discussed in literature since Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), in addition to current technological advances into ‘biobags’. But what happens when not only the womb is replaced by technology – but the host body is also? This paper aims to explore media examples of the artificial mothers in two forms; robot versus humanoid.
Most robotic mothers are often set in a (post)apocalyptic settings; such as in I am Mother (2019) and Carole Stivers’ Mother Code (2020), where without real humans to compete with, there is little concern over its non-human visage. In contrast, humanoid depictions are often near-future, and appear as seductive female look-alikes. While most are restrained to nanny-roles, such as in Humans (2015-2018) and Subservience (2024), Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972) has human women replaced with humanoids; though supposedly more for their wifely duties over childrearing. In my own creative thesis, These Hollow Vessels (unpublished), I explore ‘model mothers’; female-coded humanoids who carry external wombs, both surrogate gestators and mothers.
Within these media examples, it is usually the robotic mothers who are ‘allowed’ to carry external wombs; are the humanoids too uncanny, or too easily ‘replacing’ real human mothers? In this paper I will focus on both large-scale influences and inherent biases to determine the causality of each side.

Eleanor McAdam is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Liverpool. Their research interests concern science fiction literature, with a specific focus on Artificial Intelligence and how it intersects with reproductive technologies. Their creative work has won the Language Evolves competition, subsequently published in Interzone Issue 302, as the Liverpool Literary Festival short story competition. They have been a guest on the Ancillary Review Podcast, A Meal of Thorns, and are an organiser for the Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference.

Faye Lynch (University of Liverpool), ‘Artificial Girlfriends, Real Problems: AI Girlfriends and the Fictional Fembot in the 21st Century’

Depictions of artificial women as romantic partners to human men has been a popular literary trope since at least myth of Pygmalion in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses. However, in an era in which the increasing sophistication and popularity of generative chatbots have led to a rash of ‘AI Girlfriend’ applications such as Replika, Dream Companion and Harmony, it is worth appraising the fictional fembot anew.
This paper examines two contemporary fembot texts, Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot (2024) and Sarah Crossan’s Hey, Zoey (2024), in relation to its real-life counterpart: the AI girlfriend. Contemporary fembot texts often attempt to grabble with the gender essentialism endemic in fembot depictions by imbuing their artificial women with humanity. This is effective narratively but tends to bypass why the mistreatment of female-coded technology is harmful to us, even if the robots do not feel a thing.
This paper asks how the figure of the female-coded robot, or fembot, has shifted in relation to this technological change, particularly how its function as a fictional metaphor is strained by early forms of artificial girlfriend technology becoming widely available.

Faye Lynch is a third year PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Liverpool, where she is developing her thesis on depictions of the ‘fembot’ in post-1950 Science Fiction, considering how these depictions illuminate our changing cultural perceptions of technology, gender, and sexuality. She is a lead organiser and social media manager of the Current Research in Speculative Fiction (CRSF) Conference at the University of Liverpool. Faye has had reviews published in Foundation. Her other research interests include Contemporary American Fiction, The Cold War in Literature and Visual Culture, and Twentieth Century Poetry.

Gabriel Burrow (Birkbeck), ‘Creating the Torment Nexus: Silicon Valley, Science Fiction, and the Metaverse’

There’s a common joke within science fiction circles derived from a Tweet by author Alex Blechman (2021). It reads, “Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale. Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus”. The joke, of course, is that tech executives fail to engage with the critical aspect of science fiction, even when it’s staring them in the face. The cyberpunk dystopias that have inspired a wave of metaverse products and companies are just that—dystopias. In William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), the power wielded by corporations and organised crime leads to worlds that are defined by inequality and violence. This paper places contemporary works such as Norah Nagi’s short story “Unicorn2512” (2024) and oddball-comedy series Upload (2020) in dialogue with Gibson and Stephnson’s novels, identifying throughlines and points of divergence. It combines this with tech criticism, highlighting the dystopian aspects of the metaverse that are being reproduced by Silicon Valley firms today. Finally, it gestures towards alternative models for cyberspace found within science fiction.

Gabriel Burrow is a writer, editor, and researcher based in London. He’s currently completing a PhD in Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. His scholarship has been published by SF Foundation, SFRA Review, and MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, where he also serves as Editor. Alongside academia, he is Research Lead for creative agency TEAM LEWIS, working on everything from renewables and microgrids to space law and AI.

 

Panel 4.2: Victorian Health 

Anne-Marie Millim (University of Luxembourg), ‘“Pain comes without a voice” (Kempner): The Representation of Migraineurs in Victorian Periodicals’

Migraine is a debilitating phenomenon that is more common than diabetes, but is often marginalised as imagined or feigned discomfort. As historians of migraine Joanna Kempner and Katherine Foxhall have shown, manifestations of migraine have been represented in literature since early Babylonic texts. According to these scholars, the nineteenth century represents a hinging moment in the institutionalisation of migraine in that it came to be recognised as an illness, and some sufferers were hospitalised with the objective of curing them and studying their symptoms closely. In 1870s Britain, medical doctors Edward Liveing and Hubert Airy published fundamental studies on migraine, propelling it ‘from an occasional and relatively unimportant curiosity into a significant clinical entity in the medicine of English-speaking countries’, as Mervyn Eadie has argued.
In my contribution, I investigate the ways in which 19th-century fiction engaged with migraine. I offer a typology of short stories and novel instalments published in periodicals between 1827 and 1911, encompassing 59 texts, displaying the gender distribution of suffering characters, and illustrating forms of silencing or banalising migraineurs. I will contrast the voice given to the sufferers in these stories to the representations of ‘headache’ in a corpus of popular Victorian novels (accessed via Clic Dickens) and to the representation of migraine in scientific contributions to selected journals, tracing the voices of pain and their effacement in and through fiction. While literature is often praised as a medium that can give a voice to the marginalised, the fictional representations of migraine that circulated in the Victorian press show that it is also involved in hardening prejudice by denying interiority and expression to a distinct set of characters—in this corpus, particularly women, very often French gouvernesses—to encourage derision and exclusion.

Anne is an Associate professor in English Studies. She specialises in non-fictional and non-canonical genres, such as diaristic and auto/biographical texts; landscape- and tourist writing; and the various forms of semi-/literary prose published in newspapers and magazines.

Heather Wardlaw (University of Warwick), ‘Ethical Care: Early Victorian Versions of Competence in the Sickroom’

For better or for worse, healthcare has shifted largely back into the home in recent years. Due to technological advances patients can obtain medical advice and prescriptions without having to physically meet a medical professional, mirroring the way medical care was conducted via the post in the nineteenth century. Literary representations of competence in the sickroom offer critiques of both professional and amateur medicine while offering alternate conceptions of what medical efficacy and successful care mean. This paper will make use of the Brontë sisters’ novels to discuss how the term competence, as defined in ethics of care theory, functions within the Victorian sickroom. Looking at The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Brontë, 1848) and Shirley (Charlotte Brontë, 1849), I will discuss how ideas of competence shape authority in the sickroom and patient outcomes. This paper will help to reimagine how we discuss competence in medicine today and how ethics of care theory might shift to allow for broader definitions of the term in order to increase patient care quality. As gendered ideas surrounding medical care were shifting during the 1840s and 50s, literature of this period is particularly rich in alternate visions of effective, and potentially even ethical, care.

Heather Wardlaw is a PhD researcher at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral project examines depictions of family nursing and care circa 1830-1860 alongside the professionalization of medicine by utilizing medical manuals and domestic manuals to examine the works of the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Yonge, and George Eliot. Heather’s core academic interests are medical humanities, feminist literary studies, and ethics of care theory. Heather holds an MA in English Literary Studies from Durham University and a BA in English Literature and Secondary Education from Western Washington University.

Louise Benson James (Ghent University), ‘Digestion and popular fiction: Rhoda Broughton’s Joan (1876)’

This paper looks at Rhoda Broughton’s novel Joan (1876) to consider the connections between the science of digestion, city and town infrastructure, and reading popular fiction, in the mid-late Victorian period. Published at a time of concern about food adulteration, and the end point of decades of increased infrastructure to manage human waste necessitated by vastly expanding cities, Joan engages with these contexts through its depiction of the body and the built environment. Authors and their characters navigate and engage with digestive processes, and the conceptions of body and self that arise. This might appear in moments of digestive discomfort – overeating, dyspepsia, hunger, stomach pain and indigestion – which prompt epiphanies. In addition, the digesting body, and indeed the sewage system, are both invoked with surprising regularity in relation to reading, particularly the changing ways in which books were consumed in an urban context in this period. Fears about the dangerous circulation of ideas are articulated through metaphors about forms of bodily circulation: the transference of fluids or voiding of waste. Popular fiction like Joan offers a useful and underexamined source of commentary on how the gastrointestinal interacted with the big issues of the day, such as public health discourse, class, and the woman question.

Dr Louise Benson James is a senior postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, Belgium. Her research examines literature, culture, and medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly hysteria, nervous disorder, internal organs, and the digestive system, in women’s fiction, popular fiction, and periodicals.

 

Panel 4.3: What Can Fiction Do? 

Louise Gorse (Lancaster University), ‘Neural Postmodernism: Reframing J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition as a Proto-Neuronovel’

This paper reassesses the category of the ‘neuronovel’, a term coined by Marco Roth to describe the phenomenon in literature in which ‘the mind becomes the brain’. The form is generally dated in the late 1990s, however, by tracing the history of ‘popular neuroscience’ in culture, I will argue that they began to emerge from 1970, when the materiality of the brain entered productive tension with our enduring capacity for affect. I propose that Ballard’s fragmented and surreal style in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) induces visual ‘neuroesthetic shock’ in the reader. Departing from the existing scholarship, which frames his work as a postmodernist experiment or a satirical commentary, I read the nonlinear transitions as synaptic firings, the patterns of repetition as learned neural pathways, and the repetition of trauma with modulation as a maladaptive neural loop. Guided by Catherine Malabou’s work on ‘destructive plasticity’, this paper concludes that the neuronovel engages with the formation of what Joseph Levine later names the Explanatory Gap, the obstacle neuroscience and brain physiology encounters in understanding consciousness and immaterial experience. In this way, this paper reframes The Atrocity Exhibition as a crucial indicator of literature engaging with and complicating the emerging neuroscientific realm.

Louise Gorse is a PhD Researcher in the English Literature department at Lancaster University. Her project straddles three fields: contemporary literary studies of postmodernism and its aftermath; neuroscientific and neurophilosophical accounts of the limits of objective studies of subjective experience; and emerging work in field of cognitive literary studies.

Bethany McAuley (University of Oxford), ‘J. W. Dunne and the Serial Selves of Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”’

During the period of composition of ‘Finnegans Wake’, Eugene Jolas noted that James Joyce became ‘very much attracted’ to J. W. Dunne’s theory of Serialism after borrowing the scientist-philosopher’s book, ‘An Experiment with Time’ from the Shakespeare & Co. library. ‘An Experiment…’, widely read during the early twentieth century but now peripheralized amongst modernist scholarship, conceptualised Serialism as a form of time organised in an infinite regress of increasingly expansive dimensions, which the sleeping unconscious could “travel”. This enlarged the dreamer’s temporal vantage or ‘intertemporal eye’ (FW 303) and thus facilitated oneiric precognition. Critics such as Roland McHugh and Clive Hart have identified the presence of Dunne in the ‘Wake’, with the latter comparing Serial time to the narrative’s structural ‘dream-layers’ or multidimensionality. My paper will progress to establish how Joyce’s creation of a ‘seriolcos[mos]’ (FW 263), planes of relatively contracted and expanded time across which the narrative is erratically resituated, explores the stratification of the self across universal history and futurity. Dunne claimed that the self is not a ‘thing’ at all, but a ‘travelling intersection-point’ in time; and the ‘Wake’’s depiction of mutative identities, destabilised by their temporal conditions, is in keeping with this. By re-situating Dunne’s theories as central to our understanding of the ‘Wake’’s composition, I will interrogate what happens to character, to the Wakean, protean ‘travellingself’ (FW 358), when subjected to Serial time.

Beth McAulay is a first year DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, researching the influence of scientist and philosopher, J. W. Dunne on twentieth-century literature.

 

Panel 4.4: Bodily Functions

Hilary White (Humboldt University, Berlin), ‘Wanda Coleman’s dream poems, “African Sleeping Sickness” and the politics of sleep’

Wanda Coleman’s ambivalent and political handling of sleep invites complex considerations of the history of medicine and possibilities of dreaming alike. Focusing on Coleman’s collection African Sleeping Sickness, named for her diagnosis with this condition at age 11—an impossible diagnosis given that she never left Los Angeles—this paper traces her representation of sleep as variously a site of possibility and sickness. Coleman’s work reflects both the colonial legacies of African sleeping sickness—first identified by British colonial doctors in enslaved people, inseparable from colonial concerns for profit—and prevalent sleep inequities which are racialised and classed. Thinking with Coleman’s poetry on the subject of sleep reveals practices of work, rest, writing and dreaming pervaded by the regulatory structures of the waking world, especially economic factors. Sleep and dream do not provide unqualified or unbiased freedoms in Coleman’s work; colonial capitalism pervades the structure of sleep itself. Sleep in Coleman’s work represents both pleasurable unrepressed freedom and a political history of violent systemic exclusion; sleep is shaped by the waking world but part of its experience remains irrepressible, unshapeable. In Coleman’s hands, sleep refuses to be shaped, fixed, closed—becoming a receptacle for deep thinking, capable of endless expansion.

Hilary is a postdoc at Humboldt University in Berlin, where her research project, Forms of Sleep: Literary Experiments in Somnolence, is currently supported by a Humboldt Foundation Fellowship for Postdocs. This work was originally supported by a Research Ireland, Government of Ireland 2023 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Maynooth University. Her first monograph, The Visual Novel: Christine Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin, Brigid Brophy, was published by Edinburgh University Press (2025). A co-edited collection, Gestures: A Body of Work, was published by Manchester University Press (2025). Also a writer of experimental fiction, her first book Holes came out with Ma Bibliothèque in 2024.

Chigozirim Miracle Nwaosu (University of Surrey), ‘“Dirty Niggers: They are ‘Liable to Stink up the Whole Place” in Robert Jones’s The Prophets’

Scholars have argued that the concept of smell is within the purview of sensory studies. Smell is a (relatively) recent field of study that draws its theories from the humanities and social sciences. Unfortunately, western researchers have paid (very) little attention to it. Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott (1994) maintain that ‘the devaluation of smell in the contemporary West is directly linked to the revaluation of the senses which took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (p. 3). They further state that though smell has a ‘marginal and repressed status in contemporary Western culture’ (p. 161), it is relevant to understand and appreciate how ‘such olfactory codes create and inform power relations between social, classes, ethnic groups, and women and men in the contemporary West’ (p. 161). Thus, it is my intention to analyse Robert Jones’s The Prophets (2021) in the light of the above while employing intersectional approaches and examining the relationship between smell and race, gender, and sexuality. Jones’s The Prophets has not garnered enough critical attention since its publication in 2021. Therefore, I use this novel to contribute to the study of smell in African American literary fiction.

Chigozirim Nwaosu is a PhD candidate at the University of Surrey. Her thesis focuses on the intersectionality between race, gender, and sexuality from an African, African American, and Black British perspectives. Chigozirim uses contemporary fiction to reveal oppressive cultural norms, modes of resistance, and identity formation.

Panel 4.5: Transnationalisms

Grace Anne Paizen (University of Glasgow), ‘Pay No Attention to the Woman Behind the Curtain: “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” the French Edisonade, and the Erasure of Women’s Contributions to Technological Advancement’

When the Wizard of Oz attests he’s “a very bad Wizard” (Baum 107), the character confesses he doesn’t actually create the miracles he’s known for. This claim is a direct nod to the man the Wizard fictionally represents: famed U.S. technocrat Thomas Alva Edison. Edison was first parodied in the Edisonade The Future Eve (Villiers, 1886) with the same symptom of acting as figurehead of mechanical marvels while not actually creating them. Moreover, Villiers’ French Edisonade was the first to use a fictional Edison who creates a female-gendered, mechanical, humanoid toy to replace Edison’s friend’s human fiancée, with the machine eventually revealed as having been created by Edison’s assistant Mrs. Anderson. My conference paper, then, explores how the Edisonade became a twinned genre where the French Edisonade criticized Edison and American industrialization — accusing Edison and U.S. inventors of being “unscrupulous Barnums” (Goulet 82) who were “in cahoots with mercantile expansion” (85) — while the American Edisonade celebrated the technocrat. I highlight, then, the lineage of “tech bros” in the mythos of American industrialization alongside the erasure of women in the burgeoning world of nineteenth-century tech and Villiers’ novel as a fictionalized real-time snapshot of this erasure.

Grace Anne Paizen is currently a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Specializing in literature and science studies, her research focuses on the scientific masculinities of gender and gendered technology in literature of the nineteenth century, specifically the gendering of machines. She moonlights as the first female sports editor at the oldest newspaper in Western Canada and was one of last year’s recipients of the British Society for Literature and Science conference’s postgraduate bursary.

Stefano Serafini (University of Padua), ‘Criminal Anthropology and the Literary Imagination in Modern Britain and Italy’

This presentation explores the dynamic interplay between the theories of criminal anthropology and the evolution of detective fiction in Britain and Italy from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Through comparative analysis, it traces how detective narratives in both countries appropriated, reimagined, and interrogated the scientific tenets of criminal anthropology. British detective stories often employed the language of science to construct – and sometimes subvert – models of criminality, while reaffirming the detective’s authority and rational insight. In contrast, Italian detective fiction foregrounded the adoption of anthropological methods but was more likely to probe their uncertainties and inherent limitations. By illuminating how notions of criminal science were adopted, adapted, or contested across different literary traditions, this presentation reveals the intricate relationship between criminological discourse and detective writing during a formative period of literary and scientific innovation.

Stefano Serafini is an EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University and the University of Padua. He is the author of Gothic Italy: Crime, Science, and Literature after Unification (University of Toronto Press, 2024; winner of the 2024 American Association for Italian Studies Prize for Literary & Cultural Studies) and Italian Crime Fiction Revisited: Authority, Detection, and the Supernatural, 1861–1941 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).

Helena McBurney (King’s College London), ‘Atmospheric Voices in Sandra Belloni’

“It is a cough! But I don’t cough! What is the matter with me?”

So asks the heroine of George Meredith’s 1864 novel Sandra Belloni when she loses her singing voice. Emilia – stage name Sandra Belloni – has been betrayed by the social climbing Wilfrid Pole, losing her voice as a result. Emilia decides her voice loss is caused by London pollution. Atmosphere becomes a potential site of inspiration and devoicing for women; Meredith compares the oppressive air of England, morally and literally polluted by industrialisation, and the air of Italy, which is filled with revolutionary potential. There was divided opinion in England about Italian air; it was cleaner but dangerously revolutionary. Dr Moffat took advantage of this desire for healthy lungs, inventing the “ammonia phone,” a tube “containing the Italian climate” to be inhaled in England. Atmosphere, health, and the musical voice are configured by Meredith as cause and consequence of women’s political participation. Emilia eventually regains her singing voice; Sandra Belloni marks a dynamic shift in literary representations of women losing their voices, suggesting that in the right climate, women can regain their voices and engage in political and artistic opportunities.

Helena is a second year PhD student at King’s College London working on female opera singers who lose their voices in nineteenth century fiction. She is also a writer and dramaturg for the queer-feminist theatre company, fish in a dress. Most recent projects include: The City for Incurable Women (★★★★ The Guardian, The Stage, ★★★★★ Theatre Weekly), Crossing the Line (forthcoming) and bush (forthcoming).

 

Panel 5.1: Speculative Resistance 

Sohini Chakraborty (University of East Anglia), ‘Ecological Futures Across Media: Indian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema’

This study interrogates the epistemological frameworks through which contemporary Indian ecological science fiction constructs environmental futurity, demonstrating fundamental divergences from Western climatological imaginaries. Through critical analysis of literary works by Vandana Singh, Manjula Padmanabhan, and Samit Basu, alongside cinematic texts (films) such as Carbon: The Story of Tomorrow and Kadvi Hawa, this investigation reveals how Indian ecological science fiction privileges alternative temporal configurations and ontological premises regarding human-environment relations. Western climate fiction frequently deploys catastrophic rupture narratives that position environmental degradation as future apocalyptic eventuality. Indian ecological science fiction reconceptualises environmental crisis through Rob Nixon’s paradigm of “slow violence,” rendering ecological deterioration as persistent present reality embedded within postcolonial experience. These texts demonstrate distinctive engagement with technoscientific discourse, privileging indigenous epistemologies and frugal innovation over geoengineering paradigms prevalent in Western environmental narratives. The research elucidates how Indian ecological science fiction refuses preservation-development binaries endemic to Western environmentalism, instead articulating sustainable trajectories that simultaneously address infrastructural deficits, endemic poverty, and ecological degradation. This analysis reveals how Indian ecological science fiction generates alternative environmental ontologies, contributing novel theoretical perspectives to postcolonial ecocriticism and expanding critical frameworks for understanding how cultural specificity generates distinctive responses to planetary environmental crisis.

As an emerging scholar in her 3rd year of Doctoral research (PhD), Sohini investigates the narrative constructions and environmental imaginaries of Indian SF literature and cinema produced between 1989 and 2019. Her interdisciplinary approach integrates literary studies with postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities to examine how speculative narratives negotiate ecological futures within postcolonial contexts. Her research interrogates the dialectical relationship between indigenous knowledge systems and environmental science discourse within these texts through methodological frameworks including narrative, discourse, film analysis and semiotics.

Prathiksha Betala (Leeds Beckett University), ‘Corporeal Resistance and Intersectionality: New Heroic Paradigms through Survival Strategies in Africanfuturist Dystopias’

Feminist dystopian fiction interrogates political, cultural, and environmental crises through speculative worlds that both reflect and contest dominant narratives. Yet the genre’s imaginative labour remains unevenly distributed: whose anxieties create the ‘novum’? Whose epistemologies shape these futures? Such questions remain underexamined. The heterogeneity of feminist praxis demands more nuanced analytical frameworks that account for geopolitical specificity and intersectional bodies. Through comparative readings of Jamaican writer Diana McCaulay’s Daylight Come (2020) and Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (2010), this paper examines the use of inventive strategies to articulate situated anxieties through resistance, coalition, and survival. These strategies also deconstruct violence and its contentious relationship with the ‘hero’. I trace how Africanfuturism (Okorafor, 2019) destabilises the concept of a feminist ‘hero’ as a narrative and cultural tool for social cohesion. By decentering hegemonic (white, masculine, Western) heroic archetypes, I analyse alternative heroism characterised by non-linearity and grounding in African folklore and myth. I propose ‘processual heroism’ characterised by pragmatic negotiation, embodied action, and adaptive survival, as an alternative to archetypal, static frameworks. These texts transform dystopian anxieties into generative spaces for reimagining heroic paradigms of agency and futurity while advancing intersectional feminist critique within speculative fiction discourse.

Prathiksha Betala is PhD research student in the School of Humanities, at Leeds Beckett University. Her research examines the reimagining of heroism in contemporary feminist dystopian fiction through a transnational-intersectional feminist lens. Her broader interests include queer and feminist speculative futures, intersecting axes of identity, and representations of women in contemporary literature.

Aman Erfan (University of Leeds), ‘Mycotopia? Fungi and Speculative Futures in Aliya Whiteley’s “The Beauty” (2014)’

The 21st century has seen a widespread interest in fungi across popular culture, the sciences, and the humanities. Recent scientific breakthroughs about fungi’s critical role within ecosystems and their resilience amidst environmental collapse have altered their marginalised status in Western science and thought, transforming fungi into key speculative figures. This larger cultural interest is reflected in 21st-century fiction, where fungi are increasingly mobilised to reimagine the posthuman and its futures. This paper interrogates the entanglement of fungi with speculative futures by analysing The Beauty (2014), a post-apocalyptic novella by Aliya Whiteley. In The Beauty, post-apocalyptic tropes of survival, species propagation, and reproductive futurism are complicated through encounters with monstrous fungal creatures who bring about non/human intimacies and a ‘queering’ of sex and reproduction, thereby launching ambivalent and precarious posthuman futures. In contrast, I define ‘mycotopia’ as the equivalence of fungi with utopian possibilities in recent scientific and popular writing on fungi. These writings follow mycologist Paul Stamets’ assertion that ‘mushrooms will save the world’ by collapsing hierarchies, offering alternatives to capitalism, and inaugurating collaborative interspecies futures. I argue that The Beauty’s engagement with speculative futures with/of fungi offers a counterpoint to such straightforward interrelations of fungi and utopian futures.

Aman Erfan is a PhD candidate in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where she is working on representations of fungi and mycelia in recent fiction amidst the so-called fungal turn in arts and culture, focusing particularly on 21st-century fiction by women and queer writers. Her doctoral research is funded by the AHRC through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH).

 

Panel 5.2: Roundtable: Reproduction, Speculation and Magical Thinking 

• Alex Bollen (Independent Scholar)
• Sophie Jones (University of Strathclyde)
• Anna McFarlane (University of Glasgow)

There has been a recent surge in academic and popular interest in reproduction and practices of mothering, both in response to attacks on reproductive rights (such as the overturning of Roe vs Wade), through the development of understandings of maternity as ‘matrescence’ (Lucy Jones), and through the identification of a ‘mother wave’ in feminism (O’Reilly). This 90-minute roundtable analyses the interplay of scientific, medical, and cultural discourses surrounding reproduction with a focus on the speculative and magical thinking. The temporality of reproduction invites speculative ‘futures thinking’; on the personal level, as pregnant people navigate risks and dangers, and on the social level as the figure of the child represents the reproduction of society and is entangled with political struggles in the present (Edelman). Our roundtable participants bring expertise in medical humanities, the study of contemporary literature, social research, and work with new parents via the NCT (formerly the National Childbirth Trust), to think about how pregnancy and motherhood are constructed, particularly through the importance of futures thinking. Participants will discuss how scientific discourses can rationalise pre-existing prejudices and assumptions (such as the mother being the primary caregiver) by misusing experimental data via a kind of magical thinking (Bollen), and how critical analyses of these discourses from the perspective of lived experience, literary analysis, and critical medical humanities challenge the construction of contemporary reproduction and maternity. The roundtable contributes to contemporary discussions regarding the cultural politics of reproduction, i.e. ‘the conceptual affinity long shared by the biological reproduction of bodies, the creative reproduction of ideas, and the technological reproduction of texts’ (Sophie Jones 2025, 2) by taking seriously the interconnections of futures thinking in pregnancy, social reproduction, and literary representation..

Alex Bollen is an independent researcher and author. Her book Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths (Verso, 2025) – described by The Washington Post as “a thorough investigation into the intense pressures mothers face” – explores how flimsy science has been used to shame and blame mothers. Alex was a director at the research agency Ipsos and became an independent researcher in 2011. Alex is also a Postnatal Practitioner with the NCT and has been running groups for new mothers in London for over a decade.

Sophie Jones is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Strathclyde. Her first monograph, The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959-1973 was published by Edinburgh University Press in December 2025. She is co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health (2022). Her current research explores nausea and vomiting in pregnancy in contemporary literature and film.

Anna McFarlane is James Murray Beattie Lecturer in Fantasy at the University of Glasgow and co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities (2025). Her research on traumatic pregnancy and its expression in fantastika was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. She is a Visiting Collaborator on the Wellcome-Trust funded Future of Human Reproduction project at the University of Lancaster.

 

Panel 5.3: Victorian Evolution 

John Holmes (University of Birmingham), ‘And one great Slaughter-house the warring world!’

Maurizio Valsania has argued that ‘it is a mistake to cast over Erasmus Darwin’s proto-evolutionism the light that comes from Origin of Species’ on the grounds that ‘Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionism had a metaphysical, mythical, mystical, symbolic charge totally lacking in his grandson’s theory’. In this paper, I want to challenge Valsania’s premise by casting light from Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature on his grandson’s version of evolution. Starting from one of the few quotations marked by Charles Darwin in his copy of this verse treatise, I will show how both Darwins sought to address the same problem by ameliorating their common vision of what Charles would call the ‘war of nature’. Both combine Malthusian necessity with a pleasure principle whereby the inevitable suffering entailed by the struggle for survival is outweighed by the benefit to and happiness of the survivors. But it is Charles, more than Erasmus, who relies on myth to make this case as The Origin of Species combines elements from the overarching allegory of Erasmus Darwin’s poem, in which Nature’s temple is raised in the Garden of Eden, with a Wordsworthian folk characterisation of Nature as caring and Carlyle’s revival of the Norse world-tree Igdrasil.

John Holmes is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham and President of the Commission on Science and Literature. His books include Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (2009) and The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (2018).

Amy Waterson (Independent Scholar), ‘“You can never justly calkilate what’ll come on’t”: The Social and Scientific Implications of “Breeding” in The Mill on the Floss (1860)’

The prominent position afforded to Charles Darwin and his theories of evolution by natural selection in relation to studies of George Eliot’s interest in science is restrictive. To facilitate a convincing connection between Eliot’s fiction and Darwin’s work, critics tend to direct their attention towards her later novels. Eliot’s career as an author and her alertness to scientific thought extends beyond Darwin, thus considering Eliot’s earlier novels within the context of relevant scientific thought, is illuminating, as well as more properly representative of the scope of Eliot’s engagement with science.

My paper will examine how Eliot’s knowledge of Herbert Spencer’s early theories of transmutation (1851-1857) informs her depictions of Tom and Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1859). I will consider how Eliot uses the concept of selective breeding to amplify the dissonance between character physiognomies and individual nature by highlighting the influence of nineteenth-century concerns surrounding race and gender, inheritance and descent. Reading Eliot’s depictions of Tom and Maggie against a background of Spencerian thought and selective breeding practices reveals a sophisticated critique of social norms, and underscores the problems in considering cultural discourses or science as having the last word on human nature.

Amy has recently completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Amy’s research interests include the interplay between scientific thought and literary writing during the nineteenth century.

Heru Wang (Lingnan University), ‘Selkie Tales in the 1890s Scottish Celtic Renaissance: ‘Fiona Macleod’ and Patrick Geddes’s Skepticism towards Evolutionary Theories’

Writing as his female persona ‘Fiona Macleod’ in 1896, the Scottish writer William Sharp dedicated his selkie story ‘The Dan Nan Ron’ to Grant Allen, a steadfast critic of reductionist interpretations of evolutionary theories. The story narrates how an alleged selkie comes to identify with seals not through heredity, but through violent human design. In doing so, it appears to reject the Lamarckian-Spencerian model of inherited progress while embracing a distinctly a-teleological Darwinian logic—one that resists any notion of inevitable or progressive evolution. However, as I argue in this paper, the possibility to read the alleged selkie as a human victim of discursive manipulation underscores a subversion of Darwinian discourse of ‘natural’ selection. In this light, Sharp’s dedication to Allen is as much an act of challenge as of recognition: published by Geddes and Colleagues where Sharp served as the manager, the story ultimately aligns with Patrick Geddes’s skepticism towards evolutionary theories, cautioning against the danger of ‘egotism’ and ‘ravening’ while foregrounding human ‘love’ and ‘fostering’ as ‘the pioneer process in the ascent of life’.

Heru is a doctoral student at Lingnan University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in translation and a master’s degree in English studies. Her research interests lie in nineteenth-century literature, literary representation of women, and pseudonyms.

Panel 5.4: Natural History and Narrative 

Nathan Lewis Bramald (University of Liverpool), ‘The living and the dead: Using living displays to inspire natural history storytelling’

The World Museum in Liverpool has both living and natural history displays featuring specimens from the natural world, but their aquarium gallery attracts 3 times more monthly visitors than their Natural History Centre. While both galleries encourage engagement with conservation messaging, the narratives possible with natural history objects are potentially more diverse and allow for messaging around evolution, endangerment and extinction.

In this paper, we investigate what attracts audiences more to the living displays using surveys with museum visitors. Visitors reported that the living displays were more exciting because they can see animals moving and interacting. These results potentially link to the human desire to create stories about the animals we see and why they are behaving in certain ways. We used these insights to design a set of storytelling workshops which allowed visitors to engage with natural history objects alongside living displays. We also asked visitors to write stories which imagine the natural history world using inspiration from observing the living displays. We will present an evaluation of the workshops, including an analysis of the stories written by visitors, and suggest how our insights can inspire similar initiatives that seek to improve engagement with natural history displays through storytelling.

Nathan Lewis Bramald is a doctoral student studying at the University of Liverpool on a School of the Arts doctoral scholarship. His research pertains to the representation of dinosaurs in anglophone literature and film, with particular reference to how the science of the “Dinosaur Renaissance” has been communicated through literary fiction.

Richard Fallon (University of Cambridge), ‘Literature and Science in Natural History Collections: Reading the Graptolites’

Arts and humanities scholars, especially historians of art, historians of science, and creative practitioners, are now regularly engaging with natural history collections (NHCs) — collections still popularly considered scientific resources for scientific use. Literature and science has occupied a fairly small corner of this growing field of interdisciplinary research. This is understandable: the spaces and specimens of NHCs can seem intrinsically non-literary, however we may define this term. What can a literary scholar do when confronted with a seed accession catalogue, random mineral, or nondescript sea urchin? And why would a literary scholar even turn to materials like this? Categorising approaches to NHCs in scholarship dealing with literature, my paper will review the extant toolkit for this heterogeneous field of research. I argue that bringing attention to matters like form, genre, textuality, narrative, and reading to the study of NHCs will help to connect literary scholarship in profitable ways with various interdisciplinary challenges. I will also indicate how the field may be approached with reference to my research on materials that appear impervious to literary methods: the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences’ vast collections of the small, uncharismatic fossil invertebrates called graptolites.

Richard Fallon is Research Associate in Natural History Humanities at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge. His most recent monograph, Contesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

Shannon Lambert (Ghent University), ‘“I see a starfish!”: Charting Excitement and Engagement in Online Marine Citizen Science Projects’

In the article “Narrative: Common Ground for Literature and Science” (2018), Daniel A. Newman argues that the field of Literature and Science studies has traditionally privileged the presence and role of science in literary texts. In order for a truly two-way dialogue to emerge, Newman argues, the field needs to involve more scientists and foreground shared concepts and tools such as “narrative.” This presentation takes up the latter to explore how literary tools might be used to engage with scientific forms and texts like the database. More specifically, I turn to two citizen science database projects, Plankton Portal and OceanEYEs (both hosted on the Zooniverse website), to consider how narrative templates like ‘the quest’, and strategies like metaphor and anthropomorphism influence people’s engagement with science. I argue that reading for emotion in databases not only allows us to ‘flip the script’ on Literature and Science’s frequent focus on literary texts, but also offers a meaningful contribution to sociological studies of citizen science. While Ursula Heise (2016) has argued that biodiversity databases can be understood through literary forms and affects like elegy and mourning, I argue that in the discourse sections of these projects, affects like excitement, surprise, and interspecies empathy play important roles in people’s enthusiasm for, and participation in, online citizen science projects and in the development of a multispecies ethics.

Shannon Lambert is an FWO-funded postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. Her work on topics like science and narrative, environmental affect, and the nonhuman in literature has been published in journals such as American Imago, ISLE, and SubStance. She is the author of the monograph “Science and Affect in Contemporary Literature: Bodies of Knowledge” (Bloomsbury 2025).

 

Panel 5.5: Digital Cultures

Claire Cassidy (University of Wolvehampton), ‘Cutting Through Control: Biopolitics and Digital Media in Burroughs’ Nova Trilogy’

I argue that William S. Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy (1961–64) models escalating systems of control through experimental literary form. I draw on McLuhan, Foucault, Hayles, and Braidotti, to trace how each novel expands on the scale at which power operates: The Soft Machine explores the body as a programmable site of intervention; The Ticket That Exploded reconfigures language and communication as unstable systems of influence; Nova Express pushes control to the environmental level, portraying perception shaped by a diffuse, networked media apparatus.
Burroughs was not only an experimental writer but a significant cultural figure whose influence crosses literature and media. Rather than merely anticipating digital culture, his work examines how power embeds itself in language, sensation, and addiction and the questions at the centre of contemporary debates in media theory, biopolitics, and posthumanism. I position the Nova Trilogy as key texts for exploring the intersections of literature, science, and technology, and argue that Burroughs’ narrative strategies are relevant to how we understand control in the twenty-first century.

Claire Cassidy is a PhD student at the University of Wolverhampton. Her research focuses on William S. Burroughs by examining how literary form interacts with systems of control, technology, and communication.

Sarah Dillon (University of Cambridge), ‘“The Mind of Mechanical Man” and the Limits of Analogy’

May 1949 was a key moment in the history of British computing: the Mark 1 prototype at Manchester and the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer) at Cambridge ran their first programs. The following month, Geoffrey Jefferson, Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Manchester, delivered his Lister Oration at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, entitled ‘The Mind of Mechanical Man’. Jefferson was responding to these first ‘universal machines’ being operationalised, as well as to the publication of Norbert Wiener’s unexpectedly popular Cybernetics in 1948. His main purpose is to warm against the conflation of drawing an analogy between minds and machines, with asserting their equivalence or identity. Jefferson’s Oration was picked up by the national news, broadcast on the BBC, and public consciousness and debate about the threats and possibilities of ‘thinking machines’ was ignited. Yet little detailed attention has ever been paid to it. This paper provides a close engagement with Jefferson’s Oration, attending to its philosophical and literary references and thinking. The paper focuses in particular on Jefferson’s identification of self-aware creative linguistic expression – the example he gives is the composition of a sonnet – as the marker of intelligence, and the consequences of drawing the line here in the context of today’s LLMs.

Sarah Dillon is Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She specialises in modern and contemporary literature and film, in particular the intersections of narratives and science, and speculative fiction. She is currently writing Turing’s Literature: An Alternative History of Influence; her most recent book is Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning (2021). She is the co-editor of the BJHS Themes issue on Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power (2023) and the collection AI Narratives: An Imaginative History of Intelligent Machines (2020).

Theresa Stampfer (Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg), ‘Remote Control: Television, Cybernetics and Power in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner (1967)’

Traditionally, psychological, moral, and political concerns about televisual influence have centred on the pacifying and massifying effects attributed to the medium’s unidirectional, centralised broadcast flow. As such, TV has been set against the activating capacities of other media such as the contemplative, educative, or critically emancipatory potential of drama, cinema, and literature, as well as the interactivity of new media that captures the post-modern dividual through algorithmic feedback loops. Employing a combination of STS, Cultural Studies, and post-Marxist approaches in the tradition of Tiqqun and Maurizio Lazzarato, this paper complicates this synchronic and diachronic juxtaposition of media, technologies, and societal power. I argue that excavating genealogies of cybernetic control in earlier television history leads us to conceive of televisual influence not as the asymmetrical diminishment of agency but as a technique of power operating through agency as choice, activity, and feedback. Consequently, key concepts in television studies such as “flow” and “liveness” can be reinterpreted cybernetically as “circuitous” and “real-time.” The science fiction series The Prisoner serves exemplarily as an early text that stages television meta-medially both as a technology of discipline and an incipient apparatus of cybernetic control, reconfigured as a process of (inter)activating surveillance and communication.

Theresa Stampfer is a PhD candidate at the University of Magdeburg, Germany, and a research associate in the project “3ioS: Sleep – Sore – Stress – Cultures and Techniques of Biofeedback Systems 1960 to 1990: Material Culture Research in the OVGU’s Historical Medical Technology Collection”. Her dissertation project focuses on hypnotic technologies in medicine and media in mid-century Britain. She holds an MA in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, a BA in English and American Studies and a BA in German Studies from the University of Vienna.

 

Panel 5.6: Psychology 

Ellie Rebecca Bunker (University of Sussex), ‘“My Mind was Filled with One Thought, One Conception, One Purpose”: Obsession and the Association of Ideas in Frankenstein’

This paper considers whether Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) can better articulate the lived experience of obsession than psychology can by examining the novel alongside associationism in enlightenment philosophy. Both John Locke and David Hartley propose that madness can arise from a series of disconnected ideas upon which the mind becomes fixated. In 1815, Johann Spurzheim characterises monomania as a ‘partial insanity’ whereby the mind becomes fixated on one idea. Frankenstein encapsulates the concern in enlightenment philosophy and nineteenth-century psychiatry that the mind can become disordered by a recurring idea. I argue that Victor’s preoccupation with using science to conquer death is formed by a wrong connection of ideas that encourages him to perceive his task as predestined. I build on Melissa Dickson’s thesis in ‘Experiments in Life’ (2022) that literature can ‘play a constitutive role in the formulation of psychiatric theories and categories.’ Whilst clinical analyses of obsession explain how it functions from a scientific perspective, the vivid metaphors and first-person narration in Frankenstein allows us to recognise how obsession creates its own logic and becomes reasonable. Thus, Frankenstein enables us to cultivate a fuller understanding of how obsession functions in the mind.

Ellie Rebecca Bunker recently completed her master’s degree in English: Literature, Culture, and Theory at the University of Sussex with the Chancellor’s Masters Scholarship and a distinction. Her research focuses on the representations of obsession and irrational thought in nineteenth-century literature, psychology, and enlightenment philosophy. She is pursuing a PhD in this field.

Lucy Davies (Lancaster University), ‘Nervous Contagion and Byron’s Poetry’.

Henry Gabriel Migault made the bold claim barely thirty years after Byron’s death that ‘the influence, direct or indirect, of his poetry, has really led many to self-destruction, I doubt not’ (Migault, 94). This paper will argue that the concern around Byron’s contagious literature came in part from the eighteenth and nineteenth century medical concept of the nervous disorder. The medical danger of the contagious nervous disorder was described by physician Robert Whytt in 1765 as a ‘sympathy between the nervous systems of different persons whence […] morbid symptoms are often transferred, from one to another, without any corporeal contact or infection’ (Whytt, 219). Simply witnessing an individual in a ‘disordered state,’ had the dangerous potential to create a sympathetic reaction within another individual. Byron’s work was held responsible for causing such adverse reactions in his readers, with one New Monthly Magazine reviewer cautioning that his work must be ‘carefully kept out of reach of young persons, hypochondriacs and pregnant women,’ presumably for fear of contamination (Southron, 401). I argue that it is the peculiar conception of the transmission of nervous illness that lends a particular urgency to the concerns surrounding Byron’s poetry at the time.

Lucy Davies is in the second year of her PhD at Lancaster University; her research focuses on the works of Lord Byron and the eighteenth century nervous disorder, and the intersections of medicine and science within his poetry and other writings of the early nineteenth century. She has previously written on Byron and hypochondria and the science of diet in Romanticism.

 

Saturday 

Panel 6.1: Roundtable: Common Ground in Literature and Science Studies? 

• Will Tattersdill
• Alice Jenkins

The field of literature and science studies has grown hugely since the publication of Darwin’s Plots and Darwin Among the Novelists. With so many scholars taking so many approaches to such a wide range of topics, this session asks: have we any common ground? What, if any, are the shared principles and distinguishing features of the field? Do researchers in this field work with, against, and in awareness of any critical or theoretical canon? Do we use distinctive techniques? Do we start with any shared expectations, and stop at any shared limits? This roundtable event invites all this year’s BSLS attendees to contribute to a conversation about what we have in common, aiming to explore the field’s core axioms, and of understanding the benefits of its internal divergences. Using postcards circulated during the conference, the roundtable organisers will solicit views from everyone who wishes to offer them over the first two days of the conference. At the event itself, a range of speakers will reflect and respond to emerging patterns drawn from this input, and will invite audience members to talk about how these patterns look from the standpoint of their own work.

 

Panel 6.2: Blue Literature as Prosthesis 

Felix Behler (University of Paderborn, Germany), ‘The Prosthetic Ocean: Human-Technological Perception and the Ocean in Melville’

Hannah Pardey (University of Düsseldorf (HHU), Germany), ‘Many Tongues, One Deck: Multilingual Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Shipboard Periodicals’

Elisabeth Frank (University of Innsbruck, Austria / Aston University in Birmingham, UK), ‘The Prosthetic Sea-Border: Visibility, Mediation, and the Loss of Care’

Over the past 15 years, the Blue Humanities have evolved into one of the most compelling areas of emergent interdisciplinary research, informing oceanic discourses in the humanities from history and the visual arts to cultural and literary studies. Across periods and cultures, the sea has captivated human imaginations, from the Odyssey to Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), with its haunting evocations of the ocean’s beauty, violence, and mystery. In his Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2023), Steve Mentz returns time and again to Melville’s novel as ‘the urtext of the human encounter with the global ocean.’ At the same time, Moby Dick has also become central in discourses concerning another recent strand of thought in the humanities: the prosthetic. The novel has been described as a quintessential example of ‘narrative prosthesis’, and it contains, as Peter Boxall writes in The Prosthetic Imagination (2020), ‘in Ahab’s whalebone leg, one of the most famous prostheses in the history of prose fiction.’ How, then, can these discourses be thought together? In one sense, humanity’s relationship with the sea has always been necessarily prosthetic, for the ocean, as Mentz says, remains fundamentally ‘inhospitable’ to human life. It becomes only partially and temporarily accessible through artificial extensions of the body: from diving equipment to drones, submarines, and, in the most elemental form, boats and ships. In another sense, Captain Ahab’s leg carved out of whalebone establishes a more material link between human (prosthetic) life on and with the sea.

By concentrating on representations of ships and the experiences of sailors, refugees, and other travellers of the sea, this panel investigates the relation between ‘blue literature’ and the concept of prosthesis, while simultaneously thinking of literature itself as a prosthetic device à la Boxall and Alison Landsberg (Prosthetic Memory, 2004): a conduit into the vast expanses of the world’s waters which, physically, we might never be able to fully conquer. After an introduction by Felix Behler (co-organiser, University of Paderborn), Hannah Pardey (University of Düsseldorf) will show how nineteenth-century sailors used shipboard periodicals to negotiate shared labour, cross-cultural encounter and potentially democratic forms of authorship. Sailors’ collaborative writing, she contends, fosters a poetics that complicates dominant assumptions about their complicity with British capitalism and imperialism, while simultaneously challenging contemporary efforts to uphold linguistic boundaries within oceanic working-class life. Finally, Elisabeth Frank (co-organiser, University of Innsbruck, Aston University) analyses Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat (2025) by examining how recurring media imagery of English Channel crossings – long-lens photographs of overcrowded rubber dinghies and flimsy life vests – turns these materials into ‘iconic’ prosthetic objects within a deadlocked maritime media spectacle. They render the sea temporarily traversable while simultaneously embodying the violence of a regime that makes survival contingent on disposable infrastructures.

 

Panel 6.3: Narrativising Science 

Roseanna Kettle (Independent Scholar), ‘“Appearance truly volcanic”: Industrial Light Pollution and the Language of Volcanism’

According to Thomas Carlyle, writing in 1832, writers narrating extractive industries had by the early nineteenth century developed a ‘Vulcanic dialect’. Volcanism allowed commentators to describe catastrophic noise, the transformation of the landscape, and the profusion of airborne pollutants, which all served to figuratively tie these two sublime experiences together. Using volcanic language to gloss industrialism amounted to a legitimisation of processes that could at times be an affront to the senses helped to naturalise industry, rendering industrialism as a powerful organic force on par with the earth’s own dangerous and beautiful upheavals. Comparing forges and manufactories to Stromboli, Vesuvius, or Etna also allowed writers to historicise industry, placing these challenging subjects in continuity with classical myth and legend. Most immediately comparable to volcanic eruption among these industrial experiences, however, was anthropogenic light pollution, especially in relation to blast furnaces, forges, and alum works, conceived of as man-made volcanoes in a variety of tracts. This paper considers examples of this ‘Vulcanic dialect’ in action, namely John Holland’s descriptive poem Sheffield Park (1820) and Sir George Head’s prose travel narrative, A Home Tour through the Manufacturing Districts of England (1835), paying particular attention to the effects of this figurative gesture.

Roseanna graduated with their PhD at the University of York in 2024, specialising in the poetry of industrialising regional cities in Northern England during the Romantic period, and has since worked as a part-time lecturer at Leeds Beckett University. They were one of Chawton House’s visiting fellows last year, undertaking research pertinent to Georgian women’s charitable interventions in November 2024, and has also recently completed a three-month fellowship at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library in Manchester on the subject of early industrial light pollution, from which this paper derives.

Martin Willis (Cardiff University), ‘Engineering the Narrative: A Case Study of the Dolgarrog Dam Disaster’

In November 1925 the dam above the village of Dolgarrog in North Wales failed, sending a torrent of water down a steep mountainside onto the village. 16 people died and the village was badly damaged. The disaster led to new legislation on dam safety that has, to this day, stopped any further deaths due to dam failure in Britain. The disaster and its aftermath are a fascinating case study in the knotted history of literature and science. Narratives of leaking dam walls and minor floods that presaged the disaster were ignored in favour of engineering facts about the strength of the dam. Despite its importance the disaster is largely unknown; a result of the failure of the disaster’s story to fit the genre of disaster narratives. The centenary commemorations in November 2025 provided an opportunity for humanistic stories of the disaster to take a more prominent place; to shift public interest from scientific faultlines onto narratives of human intervention. The case study reveals something of the turbulence of relationships between the literary and the scientific in real world examples, highlighting narrative success and failure, scientific achievement and imperfection.

Martin Willis is Professor of English at Cardiff University, the editor of the Journal of Literature and Science and former Chair of BSLS.

Jim Scown (University of Exeter), ‘Healthy Soil Communities: ‘The politics and poetics of soil health’ from the 1930s to the present’

The cultivation of soil health is often linked to the pursuit of human health. Concerns over soil health today, for example, invoke soil as a ‘human-natural body’ in need of treatment and care, often following degradation that is understood to stem from the same chemical farming systems considered damaging to human health, biodiversity and the global climate. In this paper, I trace early concepts of soil health in 1930s Britain, ideas which drew heavily on far older soil knowledges from subsistence agricultures in India – and, in the writing of organic pioneers such as Jorian Jenks, became part of fascist, racist projections over the health of a white British nation. As global warming fuels soil desertification and climate migration today, there remains this potential association between the ecological regulation of the soil body and the political regulation of human bodies and populations. Examining soil health for its perceived analogies with human health, I trace these associations as they are employed in service to various forms of health – national, racial, environmental, planetary – in order to ask what versions of health and society ‘healthy soils’ may themselves inform and enable.

Jim works on the intersections between soils, literature and science. His research is in the environmental humanities and focuses on the links between soils and understandings of nature, place and belonging from the beginning of the nineteenth century. After completing his PhD across the English Departments at Cardiff University and the University of Bristol, Jim worked for the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission for two years, on a project for transitioning to a socially and environmentally just agri-food system. He is a BBC New Generation Thinker and shares his research on BBC Radio 3.

 

Panel 6.4: Neurodiversity 

Lloyd Meadhbh Houston (University of Cambridge), ‘Autism and Albumen: Towards an Autistic Egg Theory’

This paper showcases recent auto-theoretical and practice-led work I have undertaken in collaboration with my colleague Dr Amy Gaeta (University of Cambridge) in which we seek to explore our experiences of ‘late-diagnosed’ autism and its intersections with our experiences of non-normative gender and sexuality through the lens of ‘egg theory’. Building on vernacular trans conceptions of the ‘egg’ (someone has not, yet, realized or owned that they are trans or begun to transition), ‘egg theory’ names the social and culture logics through which transition, particularly medicalized transition, is made to seem impossible. Taking its impetus from a growing body of work in neurodiversity studies that seeks to engage with neurodivergence not as an object of scrutiny encountered from the ‘outside’, but as a means of knowing, making meaning, and being-in-the-world that invites auto-ethnographic exploration from ‘within’, and placing this approach in conversation with methods and perspectives from trans studies and neuroqueer studies, this paper documents our efforts to explore the applicability of ‘egg theory’ to our experiences of coming to identify as autistic, and their relationship to medicalized conceptions of both autism and trans-ness. These experiences are analyzed in conversation with our reading of autistic and autistically coded literary texts such as the novels of Sayaka Murata, and our efforts to respond creatively and critically to medical and scientific texts from across the histories of neurodivergence and queerness.

Dr Lloyd Meadhbh Houston [They/She] is an autistic, trans-femme academic, facilitator, and performer from the north of Ireland. Based at the University of Cambridge, where they hold a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in English, she is the author of Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health (OUP, 2023) and a range of articles and chapters on the medicalization of sex, the history of erotica and obscenity, and the intersections of neurodivergence and transness. In tandem with her research, she also engages in outreach and consultancy work around gender diversity and trans inclusion for arts organizations, artists, and educational institutions.

Laura Brook (Independent Scholar), ‘Breaking the Rules: Autistic-Led Pedagogy in Literary Studies’

Building on Ralph James Savarese’s work on the relationship between autism and poetry, this presentation explores the pedagogical benefits of embracing a neurodivergent-led approach to poetry analysis. I propose that taking a neurodivergent – and specifically autistic – approach to interpreting poetry can yield interesting and productive responses, considering sensory difference, increased pattern recognition and differences in emotional processing, to name but a few. This presentation will begin by exploring Bradley Irish’s framework of the literary neurodiversity studies, and the existing literature surrounding the relationship between autism and poetry. I will then explore an example of how a poem can be approached from an autistic perspective, and the creative and pedagogical potential of analysing poems in this way. Finally, this presentation will discuss the use of this model more widely in literary studies, and the benefits not only to the academy but to the academics both inside and out of the academy from adopting neurodivergent-led pedagogical practice. I will argue that interpreting poetry outside of an expected neurotypical standard will ultimately provide a diversity of analyses as well as better supporting by supporting neurodivergent academics within an often hostile system.

Dr Laura Brook is a recent PhD graduate from the University of Edinburgh, and works on English Literature and the medical humanities, particularly in the early nineteenth century. Their previous research centred on the representation of patienthood in the works and letters of John Keats in the context of the Romantic era’s rapid developments in both medical science and patient rights. Laura’s research interests also include nineteenth-century medical periodicals, postcolonial approaches to medical history, and disability studies.

Gideon Henner (Independent Scholar), ‘Native Tongues: Language(s) and (Neuro)Divergence in Suzette Haden Elgin’s Science-Fiction Novel Native Tongue’

The presented analysis of Suzette Haden Elgin’s science-fiction novel Native Tongue elucidates new perspectives on the construction of neurodivergence—divergence from socially constructed neuronormativity due to neurological differences, which are in the pathology paradigm construed as pathological deficits—through language, underpinned by a solid foundation in literary, linguistics and neurodiversity/disability scholarship. It reveals commonalities between the pathology paradigm’s construction of neurodivergence and the construction of womanhood as divergence in the novel’s dystopia, where women are legally considered lesser beings. Womanhood in Native Tongue and neurodivergence share being constructed as an absence of essentially human qualities, resulting in dehumanisation. This commonality justifies applying the countermeasure presented in Native Tongue—creating a constructed language (conlang) for women—to a neurodiversity context. Conlangs are invaluable in interrogating normativity since they may render visible concepts inbuilt into dominant language use otherwise invisible, e.g. whether a language requires specifying a person’s gender in specific grammatical contexts. However, research on conlangs is sparse, making them an innovative, under-researched approach to liberation based on literature and language. The presentation showcases practical neurodiversity-studies examples developed by the presenter, e.g. creating an autistic conlang as a research method to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of supposed autistic language/communication deficits.

Gideon Henner (he/him) is a multiply neurodivergent/disabled translator, neurodiversity advocate and researcher from Germany, now living near Edinburgh. He completed his MA in Medical Humanities at Durham University with distinction. His research interests focus on the intersection of neurodiversity and language(s) in the broadest sense, including literature, linguistics, translation studies and cross-cultural concepts. When he is not busy with translation work or studies, he acts as the Secretary of the Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh (AMASE) and sometimes also writes weird and/or speculative fiction under the pen name Gregory Lawrence.

 

Panel 6.5: Literature and Science as Leisure, 1610-1850  

Brycchan Carey (Northumbria University), ‘Women, Natural History, and the Church: The Literary, Scientific, and Religious Careers of Elizabeth Amherst, Priscilla Wakefield, and Margaret Gatty’

In my British Academy/Wolfson funded project ‘The Parish Revolution’, I identified 1181 clerical naturalists active in the British Isles and Empire from the seventh to the twenty-first centuries (https://www.brycchancarey.com/naturalists/). Because few denominations ordained women before the late twentieth century, these are overwhelmingly male. Nevertheless, I have also identified dozens of women who were active both in the church and as naturalists, sometimes assisting ordained husbands, brothers, and fathers, but often developing independent careers that combined scientific research with church activities. In this paper, I focus on three who were also literary authors: Elizabeth Amherst (1714-1779), the fossil collector who worked alongside her husband John Thomas, Rector of Notgrove, Gloucestershire and whose manuscript poems were rediscovered and published in 1989; Priscilla Wakefield (1750-1832), the Quaker botanist who wrote numerous natural histories and travelogues for children; and Margaret Gatty (1809-1873), the phycologist who worked with her husband Alfred Gatty, Rector of Ecclesfield, Yorkshire, and who wrote Parables from Nature (1855-71) and A History of British Seaweeds (1863). These three demonstrate some of the ways by which literary women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were important participants both in the transformation of the church and of the science of natural history.

Brycchan Carey is Professor of Literature, Culture, and History at Northumbria University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on topics including slavery, abolition, religion, animal studies, and natural history, including three monographs: British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility (Palgrave, 2005), From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery (Yale, 2012), and The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650–1807 (Yale, 2024).

Sara Cole (Lancaster University), ‘“A Doctor! — A greengrocer and a doctor! — All the World are turning Doctors! —”: Romantic-period Satires on Physicians by Themselves

Writing of the relationship between science and literature Gillian Beer famously pointed out that ‘scientists work with the metaphors and the thought-sets historically active in their communities’. Ralph O’Connor argued that scientific writing was also literature and has demonstrated the impact of poetry on science writing. Doctors and natural philosophers of the Romantic period used various forms of satire to disparage their rivals or to criticise new and controversial forms of medicine or science. York physician Alexander Hunter wrote No Cure No Pay, a Romantic-period musical farce which satirises doctors, apothecaries, quacks and patients alike. Satire has a long-standing and important relationship with medical practice and practitioners, and in this paper I explore the play in the context of contemporary concerns about the medical profession. I am interested in a physician’s perspective on his own profession as expressed through the traditional literary form of the farce. Hunter’s play, published in 1797 under a pseudonym, serves as a jumping-off point for my research into satires of medicine or science perpetrated by doctors or natural philosophers. No Cure No Pay is a satire in a literary form but I am also interested in how doctors and natural philosophers called upon satire in their scientific writing and with what intention and effect.

Sara Cole recently completed her PhD in the School of English at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on the relationship between science and satire in the Romantic period and she is contemplating a monograph.  Her research interests include literature and science, the literary and visual satire of the Romantic period and the history of science, technology and medicine.

Anne Nelmes (University of Sheffield), ‘John Donne’s treatment of problematic astronomical questions in “The Second Anniversary”’

John Donne’s treatment of problematic astronomical questions in ‘The Second Anniversary’

This paper considers ‘The Second Anniversary’ in which Donne discusses the journey to heaven of Elizabeth Drury’s soul. Using paralepsis, he includes many of the questions thrown up by ‘new’ astronomy having said that Elizabeth’s soul is not interested in finding out the answers. As Crane (2017, p. 107) comments:

Drury’s soul ‘flies up in a minute all the way’ [l. 188] because it doesn’t care about answering
the questions that so vexed astronomers at the time.

I examine the type of ‘questions that so vexed astronomers at the time’. Several are mentioned in this poem including uncertainties about meteors and the element of fire but there were many other perplexing astronomical anxieties which Donne brings into his poetry. I place these questions against the backdrop of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’. Finally, I discuss how Donne deals, in this poem, with this type of question.

Anne completed a PhD in 2006 on the use of bridging analogies for overcoming science misconceptions (Loughborough University). Having now retired from a teaching career (chemistry and physics), Anne has started on another PhD (part-time at the University of Sheffield) on how scientific analogy was used during the early modern period. As part of this, she has been researching how John Donne used scientific analogies in his poems.

 

Panel 7.1: The Dinosaur Renaissance 

Nathan Lewis Bramald (University of Liverpool), ‘Realising Renaissance: How Literary Fiction Responded to a Palaeontological Revolution (1969-1990)’

In 1969 John Ostrom described Deinonychus, controversially elucidating the dinosaur to be an agile, active hunter, an assertion which launched a revitalising reinterpretation of dinosaurs across palaeontology over succeeding decades. Dinosaurs were to become warm-blooded, active, birdlike animals rather than lumbering reptiles. The speed and potency of the response shown in palaeofiction across different mediums was varied. In film, dinosaurs were hitting their stride with groundbreaking stop-motion animation, which popularly consolidated pre-renaissance dinosaur conceptualisations. Literary fiction, however, followed a markedly different path. Across an array of pulp novels and short stories, revolutionary palaeontology was being disseminated via a new generation of subversively active and imaginatively reconceptualised fictional saurians. This paper will analyse this shift in scientific rhetoric as communicated through the palaeofiction of 1969-1990, the early era of the dinosaur renaissance. Many of these texts are niche, with very few receiving academic attention despite how they cumulatively illustrate the early dissemination and appropriation of palaeontological science through popular fiction. The disparity between literature and alternative artistic mediums in this period is an increasingly valuable area of study given our contemporary situation: popular understandings of dinosaurs are once again dominated by films which appropriate representations that are frequently decades behind modern palaeontology.

Nathan Lewis Bramald is a doctoral student studying at the University of Liverpool on a School of the Arts doctoral scholarship. His research pertains to the representation of dinosaurs in anglophone literature and film, with particular reference to how the science of the “Dinosaur Renaissance” has been communicated through literary fiction.

Will Tattersdill (University of Glasgow), ‘Of Dinosaurs and the Renaissance: A Twentieth-Century Scientific Revolution with Reference to Early Modern Florence’

In April 1975, Robert Bakker inaugurated a new period in the history of palaeontological research with an article whose title also gave the revolution its name: ‘Dinosaur Renaissance’. Prior to this Renaissance, the received history goes, dinosaurs were viewed as sluggish and reptilian; evolutionary dead-ends. By the end of the period, signified by 1993’s blockbuster Jurassic Park, they were fast, bird-like, nurturing, and dynamic. The Dinosaur Renaissance stands as a major triumph not just of a scientific argument but of its public dissemination, and Bakker’s superstar status makes the two facets hard to distinguish from one another. Why does Bakker reach for the idea of ‘Renaissance’ to describe his own re-understanding of the Mesozoic past? In this paper, I argue that this word-choice can teach us about the interrelation of science and art, about the imagination at play in even the most scientific framing of ancient life, and about the role of history (and indeed historicism) in putatively neutral scientific gestures. I do this through a close reading of Bakker’s original 1975 article which, published in Scientific American, stands at an illuminating junction of audiences, ideas, and visions of the past.

Will is co-director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and co-convenes Glasgow’s MLitt in Fantasy. He also lead the Literature and Science Lab. His work focusses on the relationship between literature and science, especially as it is figured in and by popular culture from around 1850 to the present day. He is particularly interested in exchanges between genre fiction and the sciences, and his latest book, coming out this spring, explores the ways in which dinosaurs mediate this perceived boundary and open possibilities for multidisciplinary collaboration.

Panel 7.2: Science and Andor  

Emily Alder (Edinburgh Napier University), ‘Hydropower: Conduction and Resistance in Andor’

Water percolates both seasons of Star Wars’ Andor (2022-2025). It is enrolled into the Empire’s efforts to subjugate the galaxy’s people and secure control of its natural resources, but it also marks moments and opportunities for resistance on the part of Cassian and other rebels. Key episodes in season one focus on Aldhani, filmed at the dam and reservoir of the Cruachan hydroelectric power station near Oban, and the Narkina 5 Imperial Prison Complex. Narkina 5 is surrounded by water to inhibit prisoner escape, but by breaking the facility’s pipes, Cassian strikes back against water’s deployment as authoritarian tool by exploiting its electrical conductive properties to neutralise the prison.

This paper is about the conduction and resistance of power in Andor as represented by water. Water’s capacity to conduct electricity is a function of electrolytes dissolved in it; pure water, on the other hand, insulates and does not conduct. The Empire’s capacity to exert control over the galaxy is a function of its manipulation of people and beliefs, while freedom is articulated as a ‘pure idea’ that protects individuals from capitulation to tyranny. The chemical and physical properties of water alongside its on-screen depictions in key episodes provide a way to understand its role as an analogy for the struggle between Imperial control and Rebel resistance.

Dr Emily Alder is Associate Professor of Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University. She researches literature and science, environmental humanities, Gothic, and Weird fiction. Emily is co-convenor of the Haunted Shores Research Network (https://haunted-shores.com) and co-editor of Gothic Studies, the journal of the International Gothic Association.

Tara Thomson (Edinburgh Napier University), ‘Intelligent More-than-human Networks in Disney’s Andor’

This paper explores intelligence and information networks in the Star Wars prequel series Andor (2022-25), and the key role played by nonhuman agents in consolidating those networks and establishing the rebel alliance. Framed by N. Katherine Hayles’ theoretical work on non-conscious cognition (2017, 2025), I argue the devices which Andor’s rebels use to communicate, coordinate, and gather and interpret intelligence are more than mere tools. Instead they can be interpreted as active agents with cognitive capabilities, interacting with the series’ humans in what Hayles calls a “cognitive assemblage”, a conceptualisation of cognitive and material interrelations that moves beyond canonical network theory. Andor’s agents include seemingly analogue technologies, such as radios, navigational systems, and holograms; intelligent computational systems, particularly the droid B2EMO; and nonhuman organic entities, most strikingly the Ghorman messenger spiders. The assemblage formed by the human and nonhuman agents is more sophisticated, decentralised, and intelligent than Imperial agents assume when they metaphorically dub ‘Axis’ as a suspected figure around which the rebels organise. Imperial intelligence agents conventionally imagine nodes operating within a computational-style network, failing to recognise the budding rebel alliance as a cognitive ecology that has formed and reforms spontaneously, and thrives through vast, decentralised human-nonhuman-technical interaction.

Dr Tara Thomson is a Lecturer in English and Film at Edinburgh Napier University. Her research extends across modernist literature and film, critical theory, and the digital and public humanities, with current work developing in posthumanist and ecocritical studies. She has published in journals such as Modernist Cultures, Angles, and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities (2022).

 

Panel 7.3: Animal Studies

Daniel Bowman (University of Stavanger), ‘An Epitaph for the Coach Dog’

This paper begins with the little-known poem “Saco: A Coach Dog,” whose grieving narrator recounts their Dalmatian’s refusal to accompany a horseless carriage after the horses he loved were replaced by a mechanical engine. Using this moment of canine heartbreak as an entry point, I consider a wider literary and cultural history in which dogs mediate shifting relations between biology, technology, and emotion at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on a broader corpus of fiction, periodicals, and cartoons that register the uneasy coexistence of dogs and automobiles, I argue that literary representations of coach dogs and early “automobile dogs” illuminate the nonhuman labour transitions that accompanied the rise of mechanical horsepower.

Through readings that place these cultural texts in dialogue with historical accounts of Dalmatians as firehouse dogs, carriage runners, and early victims of urban motorisation, I explore how canine characters articulate forms of agency, attachment, and loss that automotive narratives typically overlook. Bringing literary analysis to bear on the history of science and technology demonstrates how stories about dogs trace the emotional and interspecies costs of a transport revolution that was never simply a shift from animal to machine, from horse to horsepower.

Daniel is a MSCA Postdoctoral Researcher on the project Nation of Mechanics (NOMECH), researching representations of automobiles and the environment in Indigenous American literature, 1960-2000.

Caitlin Mathieson (University of Strathclyde), ‘Cannibalism as an Ethical Mirror: Gendered Consumption in Contemporary Horror Literature’

Throughout literature, the taboo of cannibalism has been prominent and studied as a trope in horror works. However, less attention has been paid to the ethical considerations of cannibalism and how it can be read as a deeply symbolic metaphor for the treatment of animals in line with theories of gendered consumption. This research brings forward the ideas of cannibalism symbolising the lack of ethics and prominence of gender in consumption. Using an analytical approach, cannibalism will be viewed as a complex metaphor for ethical consumption across a wide variety of texts. Using feminist theory to explore the rise of gendered consumption and how it can be discussed alongside cannibalism; this work will address how cannibalism can be potentially more ethical and with less patriarchal implications than the consumption of animals in wider society. The research suggests how due to the taboo of the topic it is not often viewed as a metaphor full of complexity and with the ability to bring light to issues as previously mentioned despite texts when analysed indicating otherwise.

Caitlin is currently pursuing an MRes at the University of Strathclyde, on the topic of girlhood and cannibalism in contemporary literature, film, and television.

Panel 7.4: Victorian Imaginaries 

Keith Williams (University of Dundee), ‘“Wired World”: Robert Duncan Milne and the Victorian Internet’

As foundational layer of modern electronic communication, Tom Standage dubbed the Telegraph system webbing the world by the mid-19th century ‘The Victorian Internet’. This paper concerns how related inventions inspired Robert Duncan Milne’s pioneering SF stories of wire/less communication, tele-presencing and action at a distance, giving Scotland a presence in the late 19C scientific imagination comparable to that in the physics and media technology of the time. Milne’s ‘The Great Electric Diaphragm’ (1879) was a thought experiment about a satellite telephone system. His Professor Vehr sequence (1884-5) speculated about other electromagnetic forces, ‘scientising’ themes such as telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation. He also imagined them creating 4-dimensional space-time rifts in ‘A Mysterious Twilight’ (1885) or transmitted to deadly effect in ‘Was It Justifiable’ (1893). In ‘A Question of Reciprocity’ (1891) Milne wrote probably the earliest story of drone warfare, in which a weaponised unmanned aerial vehicle operated by remote control is used to blackmail his adopted home city, San Francisco. This paper shows Milne not only anticipated the online, networked, surveillance world we inhabit, but also pre-imagined a device which has transformed 21st century warfare.

Keith Williams is reader in English, University of Dundee. He has published widely on early 20C SF, including H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (2007). He specialises in relations between modern writing and technological media. His last monograph was James Joyce and Cinematicity: Before and After Film (2020). Dr Williams leads a project to recover a Scottish-American contemporary to Stevenson and Doyle. The first critical edition of a selection of his work (co-edited with Ari Brin) is The Essential Robert Duncan Milne: Stories by the Lost Pioneer of Science Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2025). A collaborative graphic novel adaptation is also underway.

Marijke Valk (University of Birmingham), ‘The Crucible Within: The Chemistry of Soul Purification and the Alchemical Universal Medicine in Jekyll and Hyde’

While scientific advancements fuelled the alchemical revival at the Victorian fin de siècle, dreams of transmuting base metals into gold and longevity remained rooted in wisdom forged by the alchemists of old. Figures such as A. E. Waite, in Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers (1888), described alchemy as ‘psycho-chemistry’, blending mystical tradition with empirical inquiry. This empirical approach to alchemy’s esoteric aspects, echoed in the Society for Psychical Research’s methods and Theosophy’s tenets, recast Rosicrucian and Paracelsian traditions as compatible with contemporary medicine and psychology. This prompted the question: could science prove the soul’s existence, using the same methods that transmuted metals in laboratories? Amid such speculations, the fin de siècle became the ideal moment to revive the alchemists’ dream of a panacea, or Universal Medicine, perfecting body and soul. Against this cultural backdrop, this paper examines how Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) engages with the contemporaneous fascination with pharmaceutical intervention and mystical regeneration. Jekyll’s search for a ‘transcendental medicine’ capable of curing both bodily and spiritual divisions and its ultimate failure, I argue, suggests Jekyll’s misreading of alchemical doctrine that challenges the idea that spiritual transformation can be reduced to mere chemical manipulation.

Marijke Valk is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in the English Literature Department at the University of Birmingham. She earned her bachelor’s and research master’s degrees from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where she also taught various undergraduate courses. Marijke’s PhD project, titled ‘Transmuting the Borderland: Late-Victorian Fiction’s Alchemical Revival and the Re-Enchantment of Science’, examines alchemy’s revival as both a reaction to and a force shaping contemporary science in fin-de-siècle fiction. Her forthcoming chapter in Palgrave Macmillan’s Victorian Gothic and the Occult explores the interplay between Gothic alchemical tropes and the scientific and occult anxieties of the nineteenth century.