News

INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL

CARDIFF UNIVERSITY, UK

MONDAY 20 MAY – FRIDAY 24 MAY 2019

Keynote Speaker: Professor Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford)

A free, international, postgraduate summer school

In 2019 Cardiff University’s ScienceHumanities research group will host the second week-long International Summer School dedicated to the examination of the relations between the humanities and the sciences and funded by Wellcome. This year the Summer School will have the theme of “Populations”. The Summer School will have as its keynote speaker Professor Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford), and will also feature workshops from leading scholars in literature and science, and the histories of science and medicine, from across the UK and Europe.

The Summer School will not only give participants access to significant researchers in the field, but will also offer professional development opportunities on publishing, public engagement, and archival research. In addition, you will have the opportunity to share ideas, concepts and methods with other doctoral students and begin to build a network of global contacts.

The Summer School is open only to doctoral students located in universities and research centres worldwide. There are only 12 places available. BSLS Members very welcome to apply! It is free to attend, but participants must be able to pay for their own transport, accommodation and part of their subsistence during their stay in Cardiff. Advice will be given on accommodation and transport and some meals will be included during the Summer School. Two bursaries are available for students from nations with limited resources.

To express initial interest and receive an application form please email Professor Martin Willis on willism8@cardiff.ac.uk. The closing date for expressions of interest is Friday 25^thJanuary 2019. Applications must be submitted by Friday 1^stFebruary 2019 and decisions will be made by 15^thFebruary. Participating doctoral students must be able to commit to the full 5 days of the Summer School.

To see what last year’s participants gained from the Summer School watch the short video at: https://cardiffsciencehumanities.org/summer-school/

A special issue of Humanities

Deadline for submissions: 31 August 2019

For further information and to submit a manuscript, visit the special issue website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/environmental_humanities 

‘Environmental Humanities Approaches to Climate Change’ investigates the various ways in which we experience climate change. ‘Climate,’ writes Mike Hulme, ‘is weather which has been cultured, interpreted and acted on by the imagination, through story-telling and using material technologies’ (Weathered: Cultures of Climate). Whereas weather can be experienced directly, climate and climate change are inevitably mediated and remediated through cultural forms: particular narratives, vocabularies, images, objects, and symbols. This presents a considerable opportunity for scholars in the humanities and social sciences, who are well placed to analyse how climate change is understood, represented, and communicated in relation to specific socio-political contexts and within specific ethical and epistemological frameworks. However, it also presents a significant challenge. How can we be attentive to climate change as story without supporting the idea that it is a mere fiction? How can we move from understanding climate change as politically and culturally produced to imagining ways in which it might be mitigated? How does an understanding of climate change’s mediations remain alert to the brute facticity of environmental forces?

The special issue will bring together researchers whose work does not necessarily fit into traditional disciplinary silos. Its purpose is to explore and demonstrate the insights offered by the humanities into the cultural forms that climate change takes, and therefore to argue for the important contribution that the environmental humanities can make to climate change studies. It will be an opportunity to reflect on the broader question of the relationship between the fine-grained analytical work practised in the environmental humanities and the more instrumentalised approach to ‘climate solutions’ in the natural sciences and ‘hard’ social sciences; a relationship that it is important to address given that the problem of climate change is partly a problem of communication and imagination.

CALL FOR PAPERS (deadline Friday 7 December)

The fourteenth annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science will take place at Royal Holloway, University of London, from Thursday 4 April until Saturday 6 April 2019. Keynote speakers will include Professor Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway) and Professor Angelique Richardson (Exeter).

The BSLS invites proposals for 20-minute papers, panels of three papers, or special roundtables on any subjects within the field of science (including medicine and technology), and literatures in the broadest sense, including theatre, film, and television. There is no special theme for this conference, but abstracts or panels exploring one of the following topics are especially welcome: (1) how the literatures of Africa, the Americas, Asia, or Australasia address, interact with, or respond to the discourses of science; (2) the digital humanities; (3) the writing, reading, and interpretation of human nature; (4) innovative or progressive models for uniting the sciences and the humanities.

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. The hope is that this format will encourage longer Q&A sessions with more discussion.

Please send an abstract (200 words) and short biographical note (50 words) to the conference organiser, Dr. Mike Wainwright, mike.wainwright@rhul.ac.uk, by no later than 18.00 GMT, Friday 7 December 2018. Include the abstract and biographical note in the body of the email.

All proposers of a paper or panel will receive notification of the results by the end of January 2019.

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.

Information concerning onsite accommodation and local hotels will be forthcoming.

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

See the full CFP here

Sleep and Stress, Past and Present

7th December 2018
9:00am—5:00pm
Kohn Centre, The Royal Society

Sleep and Stress Poster

A one-day interdisciplinary symposium in the Kohn Centre at the Royal Society, Sleep and Stress, Past and Present brings together expert scientists, medical practitioners, historians and literary critics to discuss the intersections between sleep and stress, both historically and in contemporary society. Prof Russell Foster (Head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute, University of Oxford) will give the keynote lecture. Other speakers include: Prof Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford); Dr Tiffany Watts-Smith (QMUL); Dr Melissa Dickson (University of Birmingham); Prof Nick Franks (Imperial College London); Prof Clark Lawlor (Northumbria University); Prof Chris Fitzpatrick (University College Dublin); Prof Matthew Beaumont (University College London); Dr William Maclehose (University College London); and Prof Guy Goodwin (university of Oxford).

£30 delegate fee (£15 concessions) - please book here.
Sleep and Stress is being co-organised by the Royal Society and Diseases of Modern Life, University of Oxford

University of Nottingham, Humanities Building, Friday 11 January 2019, 10.00 – 16.00.

Keynote speaker: Professor Christine Hallett (University of Huddersfield)

This one-day workshop seeks to bring together researchers with an interest in the history and representations of healthcare, medicine, nursing, hospitals, and public health in the UK between 1800 and 1948, with a particular focus on local and regional histories.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, healthcare became increasingly organised, centralised and professionalised, paving the way for the reforms of the twentieth century leading to a national healthcare system. But this process was piecemeal and haphazard, often dependent on local and even individual initiatives. Hospitals were funded by local subscriptions; reforms such as the introduction of professional nurses, district nursing, and improvements to workhouse infirmaries occurred on a local basis, and spread only gradually.

As a result, the experiences of patients, nurses, doctors and other care practitioners differed significantly according to geographical location, as well as by class, wealth, and gender. This workshop seeks to highlight these local and regional differences and experiences in order to build up a more textured, nuanced picture of the development of healthcare in the industrial age.

This workshop is the first of a series to be held arising from the AHRC-funded project ‘Florence Nightingale Comes Home for 2020’, which examines the influence of Nightingale’s upbringing in the Midlands on her work and ideas. This first workshop invites contributions from a wide range of scholars in order to develop insights into broader histories of health and care in a regional perspective.

Possible themes for contribution include:
- How can localised studies of historical health and care contribute to a broader
understanding of the state of health and healthcare in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries?
- How did standards of, and access to healthcare vary according to regional
differences? How did patient experiences differ by region?
- How was healthcare delivered in the home? How did this differ from its delivery in
institutional environments? Were there significant overlaps between conceptions of
health at home and in institutions?
- How can studies of individual institutions, such as workhouse infirmaries, hospitals,
and nursing homes, contribute to broader regional and national histories of health?

- How did hospital nursing, district nursing and women’s involvement in healthcare
develop differently in different areas?
- How did connections and divisions between the rural and the urban inform
healthcare?
- How did representations of health vary across localities? How might we better
understand these regional cultures of health?

Practical details
- An abstract of no more than 300 words along with a short (1-2 page) CV should be sent to Nightingale2020@nottingham.ac.uk by Friday 16 November 2018.
- 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.
- There will be no charge for attendance.
- 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.

The garden has long held a significant place in literary discourse, whether the natural garden in receipt books or herbals, for example, or the hypothetical garden, the biblical garden, or the lunar garden occasionally found in the fantastic voyages of the seventeenth century. The garden, too, has taken many forms, whether the cultivated garden, the meadow, the field or forest or the metaphorical garden. But the garden has also been a site for the practice of science, whether in grafting, herbal medicines, geographical purposes or as a site for ‘scientific’ conversations.

Whether the genre is poetry, drama or prose (non-fiction or fiction) this panel seeks to explore the literary context where both the garden and science intersect. Note that the garden ‘text’ here can also include art, history, and so forth. The context, however, is the intersection of science and the garden. The historical period also is open.

While the literary discourse of the western world offers a wide range of possibilities, papers dealing with the non-western European world, such as Africa, Asia, and Australasia are particularly welcome.

Prospective panelists should forward a proposal or abstract of about 250 words and a current vita by Friday, November 30, 2018 to jhayden@ut.edu. Panel Moderator:  Judy A. Hayden, PhD, Professor of English, University of Tampa, 401 West Kennedy Boulevard, Tampa, Florida 33604-1490.

Registration is now open for the symposium:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bsls-winter-symposium-2018-tickets-52160049111

There is also a draft programme on the website.