Events

The following lectures in our Autumn 2012 programme may be of interest to BSLS members:

Friday 28 September, 1pm

Prof. Sharon Ruston

Natural History and the Rights of Woman

During the two-year period of the composition and publication of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley and early advocate of women’s rights, read and reviewed a number of important works of natural history for a periodical called the Analytical Review. Wollstonecraft is not known for her interest in science but in this talk I show that reading these texts helped her to formulate her feminist theory. Close attention to her reviews of natural history reveal her developing thought on issues of equality, education, and what it means to be human. On a more general note,Wollstonecraft’s reviews show that in the late eighteenth century, people were aware of the political purpose of scientific writings.

Friday 12 October, 1pm

Professor George Rousseau, University of Oxford

The Notorious Sir John Hill: Georgian Celebrity Science and Attacks on the Royal Society

No man in Georgian England ever attacked the Royal Society more savagely than Sir John Hill (1714-1775), and no one in his era was more notorious for public scandal. This talk sketches Hill's multi-faceted life and assesses his attacks on the Royal Society and the changes they effected. George Rousseau's biography, the first ever written of this curious figure, has just appeared in America and will be on display during the lecture.

Friday 19 October, 1pm

Dr Clemency Fisher

The zoological world of Edward Lear

Edward Lear is most famous for his Nonsense Rhymes, such as “The Owl and the Pussycat” and “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat”, but he was also a talented zoological artist and described several new species of birds. As part of the celebrations for the bicentenary of Lear’s birth in 1812, Dr Fisher will explore Lear’s time working as an artist and tutor for the 13th Earl of Derby’s family at Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool. Lear used some of the birds and mammals in Lord Derby’s aviary and menagerie as models for his paintings and many of these individuals are now in the collections of National Museums Liverpool. Several are the types on which new species were based. A current project, shared by NML and the Western Australian Museum, is the unravelling of a knotty problem with the nomenclature of Baudin’s Cockatoo, which Lear described in 1832.

See the Royal Society events listings for further details - royalsociety.org/events.

Lisa Appignanesi and Lara Feigel are organising a new series of six panel discussions on behalf of the Centre for the Humanities and Health and the English department at King’s College London.  The talks will take place from October 2012-March 2013.

The series is called The Brain and the Mind and brings together neuroscientists with writers, artists, philosophers, psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts to explore how the varying languages which probe mind and brain can talk to each other.  Sessions address questions of free will, evolution, empathy, autism, gender and memory and speakers include the artists Simon McBurney, A.S. Byatt, Imogen Cooper, Tim Crane, Darian Leader, Michele Roberts and Fiona Shaw and the scientists Simon Baron-Cohen, Anthony David, Patrick Haggard, Francesca Happe, Melissa Hines, Peter Hobson, Michael Kopelman, Steven Rose, Michael Rutter and Mark Solms.  Poppy Sebag-Montefiore has made short films of the scientists in their labs which will be screened at the talks.

The first session, on The Brain, Free Will and the Inner Life, is on 18 October and is part of the KCL Arts and Humanities festival.

To find out more please visit www.thebrainandthemind.co.uk.

"‘Face to Face’ — Encounters between the Arts and Sciences" is an Interdisciplinary Colloquium to be held at Queen Mary University of London, on Friday, 22nd June 2012.

PROGRAMME

09.30-10.00 Coffee and Registration (Lockkeepers’ Cottage, Georg Steiner Room)
10.00-10.15 Welcome and Introduction
10.15-10.55 KEYNOTE LECTURE: Prof. Leonard Olschner (Queen Mary University of London): ‘A Science of Literature’

1st Panel: Literature – ‘L’Objet ambigu’
11.00-11.40 Florian Strob (Queen’s College, Oxford): ‘The Meaning and Importance of ‘maybe’ – Literature, Literary Studies and Valéry on the Beach’
11.40-12.20 Manon Mathias (Bangor University): ‘Crystallography in Sand, Stendhal and Pictet’
12.20-12.40 Geraint A. Wiggins (QMUL): ‘Scientific Creativity, Scientifically Studied’

12.40-14.00 Lunch (own arrangements)

2nd Panel: Science on Stage
14.00-14.40 Eric Heinze (QMUL): ‘The Empirically Imperial in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline’
14.40-15.20 Annabel Cox (QMUL): ‘Representations of Medicine in the Literature of Madness’

15.20-15.50 Tea

3rd Panel: Anglo-German Literary Representations of Science
15.50-16.30 Nina Engelhardt (University of Edinburgh): ‘Face to Face in the Imaginary Domain: Mathematics and Literature in Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless and Pynchon’s Against the Day’
16.30-17.10 Annja Neumann (QMUL) ‘Face to Face with Science and Literature. Two poems by Edgar Allan Poe and John Herschel’

17.10-17.30 Closing Discussion
17.30 Wine Reception

The Colloquium is free to attend but registration is essential. Please contact the organisers: Annja Neumann, a.neumann@qmul.ac.uk or m.pozarkova@qmul.ac.uk.