CFP

17-18 July, 2018 – University of Kent

Keynote Speakers:Professor Helen Small, Pembroke College, University of Oxford

Professor Priscilla Wald, Duke University

This conference aims to stimulate a wide-ranging discussion about the interactions between British and American literature, education, and the sciences of the mind between 1850-1950. We welcome paper and panel proposals on any aspect of British or American literature, education and/or the sciences of the mind broadly construed.This conference is part of Dr Sara Lyons’ (PI), Dr Michael Collins’ (Co-I) and Dr Fran Bigman’s (Research Associate) AHRC-funded project, Literary Culture, Meritocracy, and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and America, 1880-1920. The project is an investigation of how British and American novelists understood and represented intellectual ability in the period, with a particular focus on how they responded to the rise of intelligence testing and the associated concepts of I.Q. and meritocracy. For additional information, please visit our website: https://research.kent.ac.uk/literaryculture/​ Possible topics include literature and:

• Teaching and Being Taught; pedagogical theory and practice
• Representations of Places of Learning
• Examinations, grades, scholarships, qualifications
• Inequality, Discrimination, and Exclusion in Education
• Academic Success and Failure
• Literacy and Illiteracy
• Intellectuals, Experts, Professionalism
• Autodidacticism, Informal Education
• Varieties of education: aesthetic, classical, moral, religious, scientific, technical
• Learning Styles and Types of Intelligence
• Intellectual ability and disability

As well as literature and:

• Professionalisation/ Institutionalisation of Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Psychometrics and personality testing
• Physiology and psychology
• Psychological Schools and Controversies
• Psychology and Philosophy
• Experimental Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Sexology
• Parapsychology
• Eugenics
• Language and Cognition

Please submit an individual proposal of no more than 350 words or an outline for a 3 paper panel proposal to sciencesofthemindconference@gmail.com by the 1 March, 2018. Papers will be limited to 20 minutes. Please include your name, a short bio, and email address in your proposal.

29 June 2018, 10:00–18:00  

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in collaboration with the Institute for German and Dutch Philology and Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of the Free University of Berlin, invites early career scholars to take part in the 13^th Forum on Literature and Science History, also known as Studientag Literatur und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, which will be held on 29th June 2018, 10 am – 6 pm, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

The Forum on Literature and Science History offers early career scholars an opportunity to discuss their work-in-progress themed on the history of literature and science, as well as other closely relevant topics. To maximize the impact of our discussion for participants, we especially encourage presentations of unfinished projects in various stages of development.

In this view, all accepted speakers will be requested to pre-circulate papers of 10-20 pages among all registered participants. The papers can be written in English or German. The discussion of all papers will start with comments by experts appointed by the organisers and followed by responses of the authors, each paper receiving about an hour of discussion time.

All interested early career scholars are warmly invited to apply for participation in the Forum by 31 January 2018 with a title, an abstract of up to 350 words of the proposed paper, and an indication of academic affiliation. Accepted speakers will be requested to confirm participation and pre-circulate their papers in PDF format by 3 June 2018.

Prof. Dr. Jutta Müller-Tamm, the Free University of Berlin

Dr. Donatella Germanese, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Prof. Dr. Christina Brandt, the Ruhr University of Bochum

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Kleeberg, the University of Erfurt

Dr. Johanna Bohley, the University of Jena

Dr. Jenny Willner, the University of Munich

Dr. Hansjakob Ziemer, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

For registration please contact Lukas Nils Regeler: lukas.regeler@fu-berlin.de

Questions can also be directed to Maria Avxentevskaya: mavxentevskaya@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

For further information, see:

http://www.sf-foundation.org/node/233

4-5 May 2018, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK

Research into the so-called ‘gut-brain axis’ has seen extraordinary growth in the past decade as microbiologists, neurologists and nutrition scientists have discovered new ways in which these supposedly separate parts of the body interact. Whereas our guts, brains, nervous systems, and behaviour were thought to be distinct, increasing evidence shows that the boundaries between them are more porous. Both scientific and popular interest in the topic continues apace, with a constant stream of publications aimed at specialistand lay audiences, and the first international Gut-Brain Axis Summit taking place in San Francisco in December 2017.

Important work has also been undertaken on gastro-psychic connections by researchers from the history of medicine, literature and psychology, but so far, there has been little in the way of a coordinated, targeted contribution to the debate on the gut-brain relationship from the humanities and the social sciences.

This workshop will consider the value of cultural and historical perspectives on the relationship between the gut and the brain, an area of our lives that so emphatically crosses somatic, emotional and psychological experiences. The event will engage with this topic from a critical perspective, not only taking new approaches but also asking:

• What are the risks or challenges involved in studying the gut-brain relationship from perspectives beyond the strictly biological or the clinical?
• How can disciplines beyond science contribute to the understanding of this area of human experience? How does a humanities and social sciences approach differ from and / or enrich scientific research on the gut-brain axis?
• What can a cultural and historical perspective on digestive health achieve?
• How might different cultural understandings of the gut-brain relationship be communicated to scholars in the sciences, non-academic audiences, and public health practitioners and organisations?
• Who might the audiences be for this form of research?

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• The implications of categories such as race, class, age, or gender on understandings of the gut-brain relationship
• Variations across nations and cultures in understanding the links between the gut and brain  
• The history of the gut-brain relationship
• Shifting definitions of ‘the gut’ and ‘the brain’ according to discipline, nation or time period
• The construction of the gut-brain relationship through productions such as literature, the visual arts, and film
• The ways in which links between the gut and the brain might  contribute to our understanding of what it is to be human

Contributions are invited from scholars in any area of the humanities and the social sciences, but preference may be given to papers focusing on the modern period (1800 to the present). Papers focusing on non-Western nations are strongly encouraged, as are proposals from postgraduate and early career researchers.

The confirmed keynote speaker for this event is Professor Elizabeth Williams (Oklahoma State University), who has published seminal articles on psycho-gastric conditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is currently completing a study of scientific and medical thinking about the appetite for food from the Enlightenment to the mid-twentieth century.

Proposals of 250 words for 15-20 minute papers, along with a 150-word biography, should be sent to manon.mathias@glasgow.ac.uk by 19 January 2018.

There is no First or Last
Only Equality
And who would rule
Joins the majority.

—Mina Loy

Mathematics and Modern Literature is a collaborative, interdisciplinary conference exploring the ways in which writers active between the late nineteenth century and the twenty-first century engage with, represent or reflect upon mathematics in their work.

We are delighted to announce that our keynote speakers for this event will be Dr. Nina Engelhardt (The University of Cologne) and Professor Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway, University of London). Dr. Nina Engelhardt is a lecturer in English and American Studies at The University of Cologne and has published on the topic of mathematics and science in modernist literature, particularly the works of Thomas Pynchon. Her monograph Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. Professor Tim Armstrong is based within the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. His recent publications include The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology and Pain in American Literature and Modernism: A Cultural History. Professor Armstrong is also the co-editor of the Edinburgh University Press series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture, one of the organizers of the long-running London Modernism Seminar, and a member of the executive committee for the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS).

On the face of it, few activities, disciplines or modes of thinking seem as disparate or as incommensurable with one another as those of mathematics and literature. If, according to a common, broadly ‘Platonic’ conception of the subject, mathematics insists upon rigor and exactitude in order to discover eternal, objective and universal truths, literature is often imagined as addressing itself to that which is irreducibly human, subjective, particular or contingent. Where the one may be lauded for yielding access to a neutral, unchanging domain of that which is the same forever and for all, the other might be celebrated as the privileged medium of that which differs, or of that which is true or real for us as creatures of material, historical, cultural, intellectual and linguistic change.

Just as this sketch of ‘literature’ will not suffice—failing, as it does, to take account of the significant and often dramatic ways in which our conception of literature and the literary has shifted since the late nineteenth century—so the opposing caricature of mathematics proves inadequate to register the crises and developments that affected the field—and the ways in which mathematicians and others understood it—over the same period.

As historians of mathematics such as Herbert Mehrtens and Jeremy Gray have suggested in recent decades, mathematics at the turn of the twentieth century may be seen to have been in the midst of a critical and pervasive ‘modernist transformation,’ roughly contemporary with the modernist movements in the arts with which we are generally more familiar. Rooted in developments during the nineteenth century, including the invention of non-Euclidean geometries as well as the elaboration of set theory, ‘modern’ or ‘modernist’ mathematics was subsequently characterised by its tendency to trouble or to break with established notions of mathematical truth, representation, intuition and meaning. As their subject became increasingly abstract and axiomatic in its approach, mathematicians laboured through what became known as the subject’s ‘foundational crisis,’ impelled by an anxious sense of the need to devise or discover a new, firmer footing for the science.

By 1931, the foundational crisis in mathematics had largely petered out, while any residual hope of placing mathematics solidly upon a provably complete and consistent set of axioms was dispelled by the work of Kurt Gödel. However, the field of mathematics has continued to experience profound developments since its ‘foundational crisis,’ from algebraic geometry, topology, group theory and category theory to probability, chaos theory, cryptography and computer science. In addition to ‘modernist’ mathematics, then, Mathematics and Modern Literature also sets out to explore how writers have engaged with later developments in the science, up to and including the influence of (big) data, code and algorithmic technologies upon contemporary literature.

How do writers during this period encounter, understand and interact with mathematics, whether basic, elementary or advanced, whether ‘classical’ or ‘modern(ist)’? To what extent do they negotiate contemporary developments within the field of mathematics? How have authors engaged with the the invention of computational machines and computer programming language, and how have interpretive practices, such as digital humanities, shaped the way we read and interpret texts? What is at stake when we read for quantity?  How are mathematical objects, symbols, concepts and ideas invoked, adapted, deployed, emulated, played with or transformed in literary texts? What kinds of meanings, implications or significance—political, philosophical, social, religious, magical, affective or otherwise—do mathematics and mathematical objects, processes and ideas have for writers? To what extent are these meanings, implications and ideas reproduced, subverted or critiqued in their work?

This conference invites papers on topics that might include, but are not limited to:

• mathematics and politics
• mathematics and gender
• biopolitics / (big) data / code / algorithms
• digital humanities and the implications for reading / interpreting texts
• the concept of universality / objectivity / neutrality in literature and mathematics
• mathematics, literature and affect
• mathematics and the everyday / extraordinary.
• mathematics and pedagogy
• mathematics and the concept of genius / amateurism
• ‘modernist’ mathematics and its relations to literary and artistic modernism(s)
• mathematics and form
• mathematics and style
• mathematics, literature and truth / proof or measurement / verification
• mathematics and magic / mysticism
• the relations between quality and quantity
• representations of mathematicians and the institution of mathematics
• mathematics and experimentation
• mathematics as language / language as mathematics
• mathematics and poetic meter / rhythm
• the meanings and aesthetics of mathematical symbols
• methodologies of literature and mathematics studies

The conference also welcomes contributions that address mathematics in painting, sculpture, music, dance and architecture—in addition to or alongside literature—during the same period.

Please send proposals (250-300 words) for fifteen-minute papers to mathmodlit@gmail.com by 5th February 2018. Please include a short (100-150 word) biography with your abstract. Notification of decision will be made by 19th February 2018.

Panel submissions will also be considered and should be 45 minutes in length. Please send 750-800 word abstract for panel submissions plus individual biographies. Please note that all male panels will not be accepted.

Lunch, refreshments and a wine reception will be provided on both days. Further details will be released in due course, and registration will open in February 2018.

Home

Friday 29 June 2018, Saturday 30 June 2018, Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln

(Conny Stuart Hall Building)

The Monster Conference is a two-day, interdisciplinary conference, hosted by Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln, celebrating the afterlife and reception of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the year of the 200th anniversary of its publication.

Confirmed Keynoters: Angela Wright (Professor in English Literature, University of Sheffield), Marc Hanheide (Reader in Computer Science, University of Lincoln)

The continuing fascination with all things Monsters is partly due to the critical and popular reception of Shelley’s creature, termed a “new species” by its ambitious but over-reaching creator who thinks of himself as a scientist. The creature’s life is bodged from the start. The goal of this conference is to examine the legacy of Shelley’s novel as well as the different incarnations of monsters in contemporary research and teaching contexts. Attempting to explain the appeal of the story offers a unique opportunity to promote dialogue between disciplines.

The title of this conference is deliberately left ambiguous to allow for an interdisciplinary exploration of monstrosity and the monstrous. These concepts apply, in the first instance, to social and cultural threats; i.e. to behaviours and (visual) qualities which are deemed socially and culturally unacceptable because they are perceived as amoral or unimaginable. The afterlife and reception of Frankenstein not only brings many opportunities for academic research to intersect with popular culture, but also brings into focus pertinent theoretical and methodological challenges relating to how monstrosity and the monstrous get taught at universities and in schools.

The organisers welcome proposals for papers (20 minutes) and panels (three 20-minute papers) as well as teaching workshops (30 minutes) from a range of disciplines. Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Gothic Studies
• Reception Studies (afterlife of Frankenstein)
• ‘Monsters’ as a metaphor (Monstrosity, the Monstrous)
• Monsters in Literature written for children and/or young adults
• Monsters in visual culture and performance art
• Horror Movies for adults and/or for children and/or young adults
• The Post-human, technology and robot-human interaction
• Disability Studies
• Wellbeing
• ‘Monsters’ in teaching contexts
• Popular Culture

Abstracts of up to 300 words along with a short biographical note (100 words in the same Word document) should be sent to sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk by 31 January 2018. Ideas for poster presentations are also welcome, particularly from postgraduate students. All proposals will be anonymously peer-reviewed.

• What can historical research on ageing and the life-course in the humanities and social sciences offer that is distinctive from modes of enquiry in these areas in the clinical sciences?
• To consider ageing in historical contexts is to encounter issues of disciplinary boundaries and hierarchies, dominant histories, and canonicity. What is the specific nature of these challenges, and how might they be navigated?
• Is it enough to reconstruct historical, socio-cultural contexts of ageing? Or should historical projects also develop innovative approaches that will address present-day issues?
• How might scholars in the humanities and social sciences whose work includes historical approaches work together across disciplinary boundaries?
• Who are the audiences for historical research in ageing? How might we communicate effectively with the academic sciences, with non-academic audiences, and with policy-makers and public-health organisations?
• What are the broader implications of this kind of work for developing further knowledge and understanding of the role of historical approaches to the study of human health, disability, disease, minds, and bodies?

• Senescence and old age
• Rejuvenation and anti-ageing
• Childhood, adolescence, and youth
• Ageing and scientific technologies
• Families and intergenerational relationships
• Age and demographic change
• Ageing in visual and material cultures
• Ageing, gender, sex and sexuality
• Work, retirement, and pensions
• Ethics of ageing
• Age, ageing, and youthfulness in popular culture
• Global perspectives on age and ageing

CALL FOR PAPERS

The thirteenth annual conference of the British Society of Literature & Science will take place at Oxford Brookes University, from Thursday 5 April until Saturday 7 April 2018.

Keynote talks will be given by Professor Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (University of Oxford), Professor Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes University).

The BSLS invites proposals for 20-minute papers, panels of three papers or special roundtables on any subjects within the field of science, and literatures in the broadest sense, including theatre, performance, film and television. There is no special theme for this conference but abstracts or panels exploring Frankenstein in its bicentenary year are especially welcome as are those in the contemporary period, theatre and performance.

In addition, we are hoping to put together sessions with looser, non-traditional formats, and would welcome proposals from any person or persons interested in making presentations of approximately ten minutes from notes rather than completed papers. Our hope is that the latter format will encourage longer Q&A sessions with more discussion. If you have a topic or research area which would suit such a discussion, we would also like to hear from you.

Please send an abstract (c.200-250 words) and short biographical note to the conference organiser, Dr. Carina Bartleet, c.e.bartleet@brookes.ac.uk, by no later than 5pm GMT, Friday 8 December 2017. Please include the abstract and biographical note in the body of the email and not in an attachment. All proposers of a paper or panel will receive notification of the results by the end of January 2018.

The conference fee will be waived for two graduate students in exchange for written reports on the conference, to be published in the BSLS Newsletter. If you are interested in being selected for one of these awards, please mention this when sending in your proposal. To qualify you will need to be registered for a postgraduate degree at the time of the conference.

Please note that those attending the conference will need to make their own arrangements for accommodation. Information on local hotels will be made available soon.

Membership: conference delegates will need to register/renew as members of the BSLS (annual membership: £25 waged/ £10 unwaged).

BSLS Winter Symposium: Metaphor in Literature and Science – King’s College London, Saturday November 4, 2017

Keynote speaker: Professor Alice Jenkins, University of Glasgow

The aim of this symposium is to re-examine the role of metaphor in literature and science studies in the light of new developments and questions in the field. The study of metaphor and analogy could prove to have a crucial role in negotiating between historicist and readerly approaches to literature and science. Are metaphors necessarily rooted within a particular historical context, with literary texts employing the scientific metaphors of their time, or is it possible to draw productive analogies between literary and scientific texts from disparate historical periods? How useful is it, for instance, to read the forms and metaphors of modern neuroscience into older texts? We would also like to consider the role of metaphor in emerging fields within the study of literature and science, such as performance studies, medical humanities and animal studies (as well as the connected study of posthumanism). How do metaphors function in texts that extend the boundaries of the human?

The symposium will incorporate, though not necessarily be limited to, the following topics:

• How metaphors are passed from one discipline to another (domaining)
• The use of models and analogies within science writing
• The role of ‘field’, ‘matrix’, ‘two-way traffic’ and other metaphors within the theory of literature and science: what political assumptions lie behind our critical use of metaphor?
• Metaphor and the body: how do metaphors, particularly technological and animal metaphors, help to construct different versions of the body?
• Political metaphor: how can metaphors be used to construct or challenge particular social formulations? What are the political implications of the use of metaphors in illness narratives and case histories, for example?

While we welcome traditional papers, we also encourage contributors to experiment with non-traditional formats: speakers could present their work as a short film, or as a ‘biographical’ paper in which they reflect upon their own academic and theoretical trajectories. We also particularly invite papers by women, people of colour, and other groups that are underrepresented within science studies. The conference will be inclusive and gender-balanced, with at least fifty percent women speakers, and no all-men panels.

Abstracts should be no more than 300 words long, and should be emailed to bslswinter2017@gmail.com by October 1, 2017. Selected participants will be notified by October 7.

Call for Papers