Author: bsls

The cognitive biologist, W. Tecumseh Fitch begins The Evolution of Language (2010) with the Persian tale of the ‘elephant in the dark house’: each villager touches a different part of the animal and tries to describe what its shape is ‘like’, but none can see, or comprehend, the whole. This parable, as Fitch suggests, raises…

The Science Fiction Foundation began in 1971 at the former North East London Polytechnic with the joint aim of promoting academic research into sf and greater public understanding of the genre. It has since become a UK-wide network of academics, critics and professional writers with its nominal base at the University of Liverpool, home to…

The winner of the 2016 Book Prize is Ursula K. Heise’s Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press). This remarkable, lucid examination of how contemporary culture produces understandings of imperilled nature breaks new ground in its thinking about environmental crisis — local and global — and, particularly, the terms in…

This trans-Atlantic, 2-panel event pairs a panel at the British Society of Literature and Science (BSLS) in Bristol in April 2017 with a roundtable at the annual conference of the Association of Community College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) at the Congress of Learned Societies in Toronto in May 2017.   Four papers were…

A workshop at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh 29th May 2017 Keynote: Professor Peter Middleton, University of Southampton ‘Poetry at the Frontiers of Physics’ https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nuclear-nature-interdisciplinary-approaches-to-theorising-the-anthropocene-after-quantum-physics-tickets-33614562060?aff=ampmlt 

The following books have been shortlisted for the BSLS Book Prize for 2016:   Gowan Dawson, Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America (Chicago)   Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (Johns Hopkins)   Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago)   David Thorley, Writing Illness…

The full programme for the BSLS 2017 conference at the University of Bristol is now available here. For further details, please see the conference website.

Date: 20th April 2017 Timings: 9.30am – 5.30pm Venue: School of the Arts Library, University of Liverpool, 19-23 Abercromby Square, L69 7ZG Registration is now open for ‘The Memory of Trees’, an interdisciplinary, one-day conference with the Literature and Science Hub on the cultural representation, study, and conservation of trees and woodlands. Our keynote speakers…

The Little Atoms radio show is looking for academics to interview about Victorian literature and the subconscious. Please get in touch with Caroline Christie (caroline@89up.org) if interested.