News

The Journal of Literature and Science http://www.literatureandscience.org is once again looking for reviewers to review various articles published in the last year to 18 months in the field of literature and science.

Please find below a number of articles that we would like to offer for review. Its largely first come, first served, so do get in touch with an offer to review a specific article by emailing Michelle at m.geric@westminster.ac.uk

I would also be very happy to receive suggestions for other relevant articles for review that aren’t listed below – please do let me know.

Reviews should be 750 words long. For more details please follow the link: http://www.literatureandscience.org or contact me at m.geric@westminster.ac.uk to register your interest.

SUGGESTED ARTICLES:

John Rogers. “Newton's Arian Epistemology and the Cosmogony of Paradise Lost.” ELH 86. 1 (2019): 77-106. 

Brent Dawson. “The Life of the Mind: George Herbert, Early Modern Meditation, and Materialist Cognition.” ELH 86. 4 (2019): 895-918. 

Alexandra Paterson. “Tracing the Earth: Narratives of Personal and Geological History in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head.” Romanticism 25. 1 (2019): 22-31.

Russell Smith. “Frankenstein in the Automatic Factory.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 41. 3 (2019): 303-319. 

Sharon Ruston. “Chemistry and the Science of Transformation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 41. 3 (2019): 255-270.

Helen Kingstone. “Human-animal Elision: A Darwinian Universe in George Eliot's Novels.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 40. 1 (2018): 87-103.

Devin M Garofalo. “Victorian Lyric in the Anthropocene.” Victorian Literature and Culture 47. 4 (2019): 753–783.

Richard Fallon. “Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World: Illustrating the Romance of Science.” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, 63. 2 (2020): 162-192

Mary Bowden. “H. G. Wells's Plant Plot: Horticulture and Ecological Narration in The Time Machine.” Victorian Literature and Culture 47. 3 (2019): 603–628.  

Pascale McCullough Manning. “The Hyde We Live In: Stevenson, Evolution, and the Anthropogenic Fog.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46. 1 (2018): 181–99.

Agnes Malinowska. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Fungal Female Animal: Evolution, Efficiency, and the Reproductive Body.” Modernism/modernity 26. 2 (2019): 267-288. 

Ida Marie Olsen. "Outlines of Ecological Consciousness in W. H. Hudson's Environmentalism." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 63. 2 (2020): 193-210. 

Christy Rieger. “Chemical Romance: Genre and Materia Medica in Late-Victorian Drug Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 47. 2 (2019): 409–437.

Kent Linthicum. “Dancing on a Volcano: Subverting Catastrophe in M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 40. 2 (2018): 149-163.

Katja Jylkka, “‘Witness the Plesiosaurus’: Geological Traces and the Loch Ness Monster Narrative.” Configurations 26. 2 (2018): 207-234.

Thomas M. Stuart, “Out of Time: Queer Temporality and Eugenic Monstrosity.” Victorian Studies 60. 2 (2018): 218-227.

Larsen, Haley. “‘The Spirit of Electricity’: Henry James's In the Cage and Electric Female Imagination at the Turn of the Century.” Configurations 26. 4 (2018): 357-387. 

Elisavet Ioannidou. “Neo-Victorian Visions of the Future: Science, Crime, and Modernity.” Victoriographies 8. 2 (2018): 187-205. 

Doreen Thierauf. “Tending to Old Stories: Daniel Deronda and Hysteria, Revisited.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46. 2 (2018): 443-465.

Jocelyn Rodal. “Patterned Ambiguities: Virginia Woolf, Mathematical Variables, and Form.” Configurations 26. 1 (2018): 73-101.

Brandon Jones. “Bloom/Split/Dissolve: Jellyfish, H. D., and Multispecies Justice in Anthropocene Seas.” Configurations 27. 4 (2019): 483-499. 

Elspeth Green. “I. A. Richards Among the Scientists.” ELH, 86. 3 (2019): 751-777. 

Nikolai Krementsov. “Thought Transfer and Mind Control between Science and Fiction: Fedor Il’in’s The Valley of New Life (1928).” Osiris 34 (2019): 36-54.

Sonja Boos. “Reading Gestures: Body Schema Disorder and Schizophrenia in Kafka’s Modernist Prose.” Modernism/modernity 26. 4 (2019): 829-848. 

Amanda Rees. “From Technician’s Extravaganza to Logical Fantasy: Science and Society in John Wyndham’s Postwar Fiction, 1951–1960.” Osiris 34 (2019): 277-296.

Lisa Garforth. “Environmental Futures, Now and Then: Crisis, Systems Modeling, and Speculative Fiction.” Osiris, 34 (2019): 238-257.

Ursula K. Heise. “Science Fiction and the Time Scales of the Anthropocene.” ELH 86. 2 (2019): 275-304. 

Erika Lorraine Milam. “Old Woman and the Sea: Evolution and the Feminine Aquatic.” Osiris 34 (2019): 198-215.

Colin Milburn. “Ahead of Time: Gerald Feinberg and the Governance of Futurity.” Osiris 34 (2019): 216-237.

Susan McHugh. “Mourning Humans and Other Animals through Fictional Taxidermy Collections.” Configurations 27. 2 (2019): 239-256. 

Mandy Bloomfield. “Widening Gyre: A Poetics of Ocean Plastics.” Configurations 27. 4 (2019): 501-523.

Sandra Robinson. “Databases and Doppelgängers: New Articulations of Power.” Configurations 26. 4 (2018): 411-440. 

Kurt Beals, “‘Do the New Poets Think? It's Possible’: Computer Poetry and Cyborg Subjectivity.” Configurations 26. 2 (2018): 149-177. 

Do you like books? Great! We are looking to recruit at least two new Assistant Reviews Editors to take up their post as soon as possible, with a special responsibility for looking after North American University Presses, and non-UK European publishers, to assist the Reviews Editor with the reviews process (i.e. keeping an eye out for relevant publications, processing review enquiries and commissioning reviews, ordering and providing review copies, updating the review database online). To make this process easier the BSLS will be rolling out an automated form and dedicated email address for processing review enquiries this year. These positions are suitable for all career stages.
If you have any questions at all, please contact the current reviews editor, Dr Franziska Kohlt. Please send your Expressions of Interest (c.350 words), outlining relevant experience, your career, as well as two academics to endorse your application, to bslsreviews@gmail.com by the 29 February 2020.

Forest Ecology in Fantasy Fiction: Mobilising the Imaginative Resources of Fantasy Fiction for Living with Forests.

The University of Birmingham is offering a funded PhD studentship on forest ecology in fantasy fiction under the Forest Edge PhD programme funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project will involve collaboration between the schools of English, Drama and Creative Studies (EDACS) and Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences (GEES), the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) and Ruskin Land. The PhD will be jointly supervised by Prof John Holmes (EDACS), Prof Jon Sadler (GEES) and Dr Will Tattersdill (EDACS), with support from John Iles (Ruskin Land). 

For more information about the project, click below:

Forest Edge PhD guidance notes

The deadline for applications is 10 February 2020. Applicants should have experience of studying literature at university level. Beyond this, we welcome candidates with diverse educational and disciplinary backgrounds and professional expertise for this interdisciplinary PhD. For full details on funding and to begin an application, please click on the link below:

https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/forest-ecology-in-fantasy-fiction-mobilising-the-imaginative-resources-of-fantasy-fiction-for-living-with-forests/?p117723

If you would like to discuss this project further before applying, please email John Holmes (j.holmes.1@bham.ac.uk) in the first instance.

3-5 June 2020
Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Northumbria University is organising a conference exploring interactivity between health and the written word, whether it be representations of medical practitioners in literature and art, or creative works written by medical people. The interdisciplinary nature of the subject invites work on cultural, economic and gender history, as well as literary, visual and
performing arts. We welcome proposals from researchers across a range of disciplines and stages of career, including early career and student scholars. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a short biography, to writingdocs18@gmail.com by Friday 21st February 2020. Papers will be invited on a wide variety of relevant topics. A selection of revised papers is expected to be published as part of the project outputs.

You can download the full CFP here. Further details can be found on the event's website.

Leuven, May 18-19 2020

First keynote speaker: Prof. Angelique Richardson (University of Exeter).
Second keynote speaker to be announced later.

During the late 19th and early 20th century evolutionary theory and new insights in heredity were becoming increasingly influential in social debates. Theories of Darwin, Spencer, Lamarck and Mendel were used to address anxieties about degeneration across Europe. Eugenicists sought to improve both the individual and the nation by influencing processes of procreation and selection so as to bring about the ‘ideal’ human race. Literary authors too raised their voices in this widespread concern with private and public health, the body and the future of the race. They addressed these concerns in highbrow modernist writings, social stories, courtship plots, family sagas, bildungsroman or art novels and used eugenic discourse and biological theories in doing so. The result is, of course, not a homogeneous body of eugenic literature. To the contrary, eugenic and genetic theories were deployed, commented on and disseminated in a variety of ways. Male and female authors used eugenic theories to take radically different stances within the woman question, but women writers too were often divided as to how eugenic insights could best be used for feminist purposes.

This conference aims at a better understanding of the different ways in which eugenic theories were used to address questions related to gender and sexuality in European literature from 1880 to 1935. Eugenic theories circulated across Europe, but the reception and response by literary writers was often very different. Similarly, the woman question that emerged at the end of the 19^th century, was debated in different ways in different European countries and this also shaped literature’s intervention in these debates. By bringing together these different perspectives, the conference hopes to achieve a more nuanced and comprehensive picture of the intersections between eugenics and literature around the turn of the 20^th century.

We invite papers about all European literary traditions that address such questions as the following:

• How is the new biological and genetic knowledge presented and mediated in literary texts?
• How is the discourse of eugenics deployed in literary texts?
• How are eugenic theories used to serve the emancipation of women in society or, conversely, how are they used to argue for traditional gendered divisions and roles?
• How did evolution and eugenics shape feminist ideas in literature?
• How did the use of eugenic theories change across the period?

Topics might include (but are not limited to)

• Debates on motherhood, reproductive health, pregnancy, breast feeding, birth control, family planning and abortion
• Representations of illness, feeblemindedness, degeneracy and insanity
• Atavism, Hereditary diseases, family health and genetics
• Evolution and sexual difference
• Biological essentialism
• Representations of women doctors and nurses
• Depictions of female ancestry and lines of heredity
• Degenerate masculinity and ‘fit’ manhood
• Eugenic partner choice

This symposium is organized in the context of a large comparative research project, Literary Knowledge, 1890-1950: Modernisms and the Sciences in Europe , by the research lab MDRN at the University of Leuven in Belgium. Please send an abstract (350 words) and a short bio to Fatima Borrmann (fatima.borrmann@kuleuven.be) by 31 January 2020. The presentation of papers should not exceed 20 minutes.

We have been asked to circulate the CFP for the 2020 ESCL/SELC Conference, to be held on 24-27 November at the University of Torino. The conference website is here!

In view of the recent university strikes in Britain, the BSLS and the conference organisers have made the decision to extend the CFP deadline for our annual conference. The new deadline is the 19th of this month! Full details of the conference, which will take place at Sheffield next year, can be found here.

The BSLS, its members, and the work they produce all suffer in various ways as a result of the casualisation, marketisation, and workload pressures against which the strike was set. If you would like to read more about the dispute, one place to start is here.

27 January 2020, Council Room, Trent Building, University of Nottingham

Email: nightingale2020@nottingham.ac.uk

Website: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Conference/fac-arts/Humanities/History/The-Home-in-History/index.aspx.aspx

Keynote speaker: Professor Jane Hamlett, Royal Holloway

CFP deadline: 22 November 2019

The University of Nottingham's AHRC-funded project 'Florence Nightingale Comes Home for 2020' (see www.florencenightingale.org) is arranging the second of a series of three thematic project workshops. Following the first successful event on nineteenth-century healthcare, this second workshop seeks to examine, from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the broad theme of 'Home' and its applicability as a prism through which to understand historical change.

'Home' is an elusive notion, lacking a permanent definition; it is a concept that is manifested through specific places and at specific times yet also transcends these. Edwin Heathcote, in The Meaning of Home (2012), wrote that homes are 'receptacles of both personal and collective memory, containers of meaning and symbol'. The history of the home unavoidably overlaps with histories of gender, work and architecture, geographies of mobility, and cultural and literary readings of concepts such as domesticity, the family, and privacy. In recent decades, these concepts have become fundamental to readings of modern social history, not least in the nineteenth century. For example, scholars use domesticity as a prism through which to investigate the history of public buildings, institutions and public spaces, alongside the Foucauldian paradigm of power and control. 

The case of Florence Nightingale demonstrates the richness and elasticity of the term ‘home’. Home for Nightingale meant variously a childhood sanctuary, a prison constraining women's energy, the object of sanitary reform, a communal place for nurses to live and study, a spiritual refuge, and the place one went to after death. These ideas will be explored in the forthcoming book Florence Nightingale At Home, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.

While the team's focus is on nineteenth-century Britain, the workshop welcomes contributions from a range of periods and locations. Papers are invited from specialists in history, literature, geography, architecture, material culture, or other scholars with new/distinctive perspectives on the history and culture of the home.

Contributors are invited to address the following questions:

• What has been the historical relationship between (ideas of) home and the built environment? How do changing uses of space, furniture and decoration reflect ideological/cultural/historical patterns?
• What tensions can be observed between ideologies of domesticity on the one hand, and life in non-family based institutions on the other?
• What has 'home' meant in such institutions as: hospitals, convents, boarding schools, asylums, military barracks, prisons, factories?
• How have ideas of 'homeliness' been challenged/modified/subverted at different times?
• How far is 'home' a useful concept for understanding national, cultural, or ideological histories?
• How has home been represented and contested in literature and popular culture? To what extent have these depictions of home influenced other forms of discourse, for example health discourse?

Practical details

- An abstract of no more than 300 words along with a short (1-2 page) CV should be sent to Richard.Bates1@nottingham.ac.uk or nightingale2020@nottingham.ac.uk by Friday 22 November 2019.

- The workshop is fully funded as part of the AHRC Research Grant-funded project ‘Florence Nightingale Comes Home for 2020: an historico-literary analysis of her family life’, grant ref AH/R00014X/1. (www.florencenightingale.org)

- There will be no charge for attendance.

- Applications from PhD students and early career researchers are welcomed.

- A limited number of travel bursaries are available for travel within the UK. To apply, please include an estimate of your travel costs in your email application.