Agustí Nieto-Galan, Professor of History of Science at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, sends word of a new call for participation in an edited volume on Flammarion in Latin America. The full call - in Spanish - is here.
You are currently browsing the archive for the News category.
The full programme for this year's Extinctions and Rebellions symposium - to take place on Nov 16th 2019 at the University of Liverpool - can now be downloaded here!
If you'd like to attend, tickets are still available. They are free, but you need to sign up at this link.
More details about our annual symposium can be found on this page.
Tuesday 29 October, 7-8.30pm
The Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS
In autumn 1933, Albert Einstein found himself living alone in an isolated holiday hut in rural England. There, he toiled peacefully at mathematics while occasionally stepping out for walks or to play his violin. But how had Einstein come to abandon his Berlin home and go ‘"on the run"? Andrew Robinson tells the story of the world’s greatest scientist and Britain for the first time, showing why Britain was the perfect refuge for Einstein from rumoured assassination by Nazi agents.
For tickets (£7-16) and more info, please click here.
Wednesday 8th and Thursday 9th April 2020
Kelvin Hall, University of Glasgow, Scotland
https://phpiglasgow.wixsite.com/website | @phpi_glasgow
Deadline for abstracts: midnight Friday 29th November 2019
Public Health, Private Illness is a two-day interdisciplinary medical humanities conference for early career researchers and postgraduate students.
We live in a climate of public health crises. Debates rage over the future of the NHS. Vaccination has become politicised. Concerns are mounting about emerging infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance in an age of globalisation. At the same time, new ways of conceiving of health and illness at an individual level have emerged. Neoliberal policy focuses on individual risk and lifestyle interventions. Social movements like neurodiversity, mad pride or body positivity challenge medical discourses and rework difference as identity rather than pathology.
We want to interrogate the public/private distinction within health, medicine and wellbeing, and to examine the many and complex intersections between public health ideals and the individual experience of health, illness, body and mind. We are particularly interested in debating marginalised and non-traditional perspectives on what can sometimes be a well-trodden debate.
Alongside panels, the conference includes a number of optional and less formal sessions on the conference theme. These include: a book-making workshop; a zine handling and discussion workshop, a creative writing workshop, and museum object-handling session, and a death cafe discussion.
We are also hosting a poetry and fiction reading event on the Wednesday evening (venue TBC). This event is open to the public and will allow us to explore creative responses to the conference theme in a more informal, non-academic context. More information to follow soon for those interested in reading their work at this event.
Keynote Speaker: Dr Chisomo Kalinga, University of Edinburgh - ‘No man is an island’: Understanding Indigenous and African perspectives of personal wellbeing within Global Health Studies
Possible topics: We are open to proposals from a variety of backgrounds and time periods from scholars whose work concerns issues of health, illness, medicine and care. This includes cultural, literary, historical, linguistic, philosophical, theological and political approaches as well as practice-based responses to the theme and humanities work from within medical and veterinary science and practice. All approaches are welcome.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- public health campaigns and social health movements, including those which challenge medical discourses
- conceptions of health, fitness and wellbeing
- body, mind, and (inter)subjectivity
- issues of conformism and resistance within medicine
- health inequalities and stigma
- nursing and other modes of care; the role of allied health care professionals
- mental health, madness and psychological disorder
- dying, death, hospice and end-of-life care
Abstracts: We welcome modes of presentation beyond conventional 20-minute papers including readings, performances, displays and posters as well as less formal 10-minute papers as provocations for discussion. Proposals for 20-minute papers or 10-minute provocations should include a 250-word abstract and a 100-word biography with contact information. Proposals for other formats should include a title, brief description and 100-word biography and contact details. Please do not feel constrained by the conventions of your discipline. All submissions and enquiries should be sent to PHPIGlasgow@gmail.com by midnight on Friday 29th November 2019.
Cost: This conference is free to attend. In addition, a limited number of travel bursaries are available. If you wish to be considered for a bursary, please include a 100-word justification with your proposal, outlining how you will be travelling to the conference and how attending is relevant to your studies/career.
Venue: The conference will be held at Kelvin Hall in Glasgow’s West End, minutes away from the University of Glasgow. It is easily accessible: the Kelvin Hall travel guide includes detailed information about travel by bus, car, foot, bicycle, train and subway.
Accessibility: Kelvin Hall is fully wheelchair accessible. There is a hearing assistance system for the lecture theatre and step free access to the speaker's area. There is an onsite quiet room, a parents’ room and accessible changing room. Please view the Kelvin hall floor plan or the Accessable guide (which includes detailed information and photographs) for more information. Contact us at PHPIGlasgow@gmail.com if you would like to discuss your accessibility needs further.
Organisers: This conference is organised by the Medical Humanities ECR Group at the Medical Humanities Research Centre, University of Glasgow. It is generously funded by the University of Glasgow’s College of Arts and the British Society for Literature and Science.
Please direct any questions to PHPIGlasgow@gmail.com
The fifteenth annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science will be held at the University of Sheffield from Wednesday 15 April until Friday 17 April 2020.
Keynote speakers will be Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Oxford), Professor Martin Willis (Cardiff), and Professor Angela Wright (Sheffield).
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.
The conference will include a visit to the Alfred Denny Zoological Museum (pictured), and the Turner Museum of Glass will host a keynote lecture and the wine reception.
Please send an abstract (200 words) and short biographical note (50 words) to Katherine Ebury and Helena Ifill at shefbsls2020@gmail.com by no later than 18.00 GMT on Thursday 12th of December. Please include the abstract and biographical note in the body of the email.
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 registration fees 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).
Queen's University, Belfast
15-17 September 2020
Keywords
Accidental, arbitrary, incidental, slapdash, hit-or-miss, unplanned, unintended (e.g. consequences), unexpected, unanticipated, unpredictable, contingent, volatility, excitement, wonder, fantasy, imagination, creativity, serendipity.
Chance encounters, unforeseen opportunities, and impulsive decisions play a bigger role in our life and work than we wish to acknowledge. Is reading not always random to some extent? It is only retrospectively, in shifting scale from the individual to social or perspective from reading to interpreting, that randomness becomes regularity and can get explained away as purpose and design.
Randomness and chance play a leading role in historical accounts, in narratives of war and battles, victory and defeat, in biographies and travelogues, in narratives of arrivals, encounters and departures. They resurface in stories, setting characters onto a course or hurtling them into the great unknown, towards their fate. People’s bookshelves, readers’ memories, and second-hand bookshops can produce a similar, puzzling – even dizzying – sense of randomness.
Fortunes of literary works and theory are not immune to the dictates of chance. What are the forces that get literary works published, translated, circulated locally or internationally, and nominated for and winning literary prizes? When do managed search algorithms fail and serendipitous connections appear? How do chance encounters with a literary work, a theory, or lead to translations or adaptations, new creative adventures, or additional and alternative theories?
Artists and writers can be more comfortable with randomness than scholars; they break away from the space of the familiar and the already-known and place trust in the process of the work itself. Critics are driven by institutional pressures to present their work as an execution of purpose, design and method. But randomness persists even in grand geo-political schemes. Randomness overcomes censorship and solutions are always found to circulate books without the support of publishers or the state. Randomness happens despitecontrol, and may be the more attractive for it. It is often random finds that are the most treasured with a sense of delight. Random encounters excite imagination and creativity.
Randomness is also openness; it stands more often at beginnings and turns of the road of many literary and critical careers. How do we cultivate a sense of wonder and open up our critical discourses and theories of comparative literature and world literature to more inclusive and elastic modes of thinking and writing? Can we use randomness in and outside texts and oeuvresproductively, to our advantage?
We seek panels that will work with the idea of randomness, particularly in relation to:
- Encounters with literary works, theories and cultural others
- Adaptations, new writings, performances, visualizations within the same literary/cultural field, or outside.
- Representing randomness through visualisations and digital interfaces.
- Multilingualism, heterolingualism, plurilingualism, translanguaging
- Performance, performativity
- Politics of the literary/cultural market, including publication, translation, circulation, literary prizes and literary festivals (and book fairs)
- Critiquing randomness in the age of search algorithms
- Unpredictable futures
- Ecocritical approaches to randomness and unpredictability
- Translation and translation studies, choice of work and language, choice of method and style
- Theories and Methods of Comparative Literature and World Literature
Deadlines: 15 November 2019 for Panel proposals and 15 December 2019 for paper proposals.
Submit your proposal to: randomness2020bcla@gmail.com or through the conference website https://randomness2020.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/
A special issue of Romanticism on the Net, edited by Martin Priestman and Louise Lee, has just been published on 'The Two Darwins'. To read the introduction and the articles, click here. Because of a hiatus in publication, the issue has been backdated to 2016 and published under the journal's then title Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net.
The Beastly Modernisms conference at Glasgow University (12-13 September 2019) was part-funded by a BSLS small grant. Maria Sledmere reports on the discussions which took place. Want to apply for a BSLS small grant? Click here!
A BEASTLY WELCOME
‘I want to think about what it means to give a beastly welcome,’ Peter Adkins begins, introducing our first key note, Derek Ryan (University of Kent). Giving a beastly welcome, it turns out, is an ethical approach to scholarship that holds openness, scepticism, humour and questioning. It involves prising open the jaws of one discipline to let the planktonic matters of others drift through, nourishing and encouraging richer conversations. It is something, maybe, that ‘just happens’ when you bring a certain number of enthusiastic, cutting-edge scholars together for two days, forming something like a zoology of fugitive, moving thought.
Beastly Modernisms 2019, a conference held at the University of Glasgow on 12-13 September, aimed for this symbiotic approach to literary studies. Organised by PhD candidates whose work traverses the realms of animal studies, modernism and the environmental humanities — Peter Adkins (University of Kent), Saskia McCracken (University of Glasgow), Maria Sledmere (University of Glasgow) and Caitlin Stobie (University of Leeds) — the event quickly grew from a planned symposium to international conference, with guest speakers flying in from Paris, America, Poland, Russia and beyond. Such is the appetite for a more beastly scholarship, whose commodious bounds proliferate in animate metaphors, puns and sightlines of future critical thought.
Keynote: Kari Weil
ANIMALS AND MODERNISM IN GLASGOW
Recent work on animals, animacies and modernism includes books by Carrie Rohman, Caroline Hovanec, Dererk Ryan, Roni Grén, Kari Weil and Mel Y. Chen. No conference to date has centred on animal studies and modernism, and Glasgow felt like an ideal location for bringing a twist of the avant-garde, of creative-critical openness, to the traditional conference setting. Not only are the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies (SNoMS) and the British Animal Studies Network (BASN) based in Glasgow, but the city is also home to a vibrant, ecology-focused arts scene — from the Sculpture & Environmental Art BA at the Glasgow School of Art to A+E Collective and the Glasgow Animal Studies Reading Group.
A MENAGERIE OF PERSPECTIVES
The conference came together from a shared feeling that ‘the animal question’ was at a critical point within modernist scholarship, and that it deserved a platform of its own. With funding secured from The British Society for Literature and Science, The Vegan Society, British Comparative Literature Association, and the University of Glasgow’s College of Arts, we were able to explore what this question of modernism’s ‘beasts’ might entail.
We were delighted that delegates and speakers responded so readily to the spirit of the theme. There were panels on Bugs and Beasties, Modernist Empathies, Waste and Trash Animals, Surreal Creatures, Joycean Beasts, Animal Ethics and Marine Life — to name a few. Papers were given on myriad themes of a spirited, beastly nature: the multiple ‘lives’ of nature documentary (Amy Cutler), modernism’s telluric depths (Cathryn Setz), cosmic cats (Molly Gilroy), animal artists (Kirsten Strom), the queer and comic nonhuman (Maureen O’Connor) and modernist jellyfish (Rachel Murray). Throughout the conference, our speakers challenged us to think of modernism not just in archival or literary-historical terms but also as a mobilising set of cultural and critical tendencies, with unique questions to ask continuously of language, ontology and coexistence.
It was especially heartening to see a mix of creative, critical and multidisciplinary approaches to academic conference papers. We had practicing artists, photographers and filmmakers in attendance, sharing their work but also engaging in vital ethical and aesthetic discussion around the context of that work’s production and reception, in tandem with animals, humans and the more-than-human. Martin Pover, for instance, gave a talk on photographing zoos as ‘theatres of the wild,’ and Rosie Roberts, a recent graduate of the inaugural Masters in Art Writing programme at the Glasgow School of Art, screened her film Pan and took part in a lively Q&A which saw rich reflections on reparative filmmaking, precarity, the ‘choral I', the importance of play and the significance of ‘the everyday’ in questions of ecology and what we might call (in resistance to the human-animal distinction) beastly intimacies.
BEASTLY POETRY
A crucial part of the conference was the Beastly Poetry night, hosted (quite appropriately) at the Butterfly and Pig bar in Glasgow. The audience formed a mix of conference delegates, friends, family and familiar faces from the city’s wide-ranging literary scene. Our readers, some of whom were invited and others who applied as part of our ‘open mic’ part of the evening, were: Jelle Cauwenberghs, Alexandra Grunberg, Eva Isherwood-Wallace, Miranda Cichy, Jane Hartshorn, Daisy Lafarge, Callie Gardner, Jane Goldman, and Colin Herd. The packed-out room was testament to the Glasgow poetry scene but also an indication that modernism and its beastly entrails is alive and well ‘in the present’: a question of constant reinvention, playful citation, diverse registers and formal experiment. From Cichy’s poetry of avian extinction to Hartshorn’s mythic, visceral femininity, Goldman’s biting, canine aesthetics to Lafarge’s wasps, stinging ‘with pagan abandon,’ and Herd’s anthropomorphised and tenderly-loved ‘Laplaplaplaplaplaplap Top’, the poets challenged what might be a beast and what might be modern, and how we can begin to address that in the question of lyric relationality and speech itself.
BEASTS OF THE AVANT-GARDE
We were extremely lucky to have two keynotes whose work has been essential to the emergence and development of our field, hive, habitat, tropics or indeed ocean of study (there was indeed a distinctly transatlantic, borderless and porous flavour to many of the talks). Derek Ryan concluded day one with ‘Beastly Bloomsbury’ which argued that the animal turn in modernist studies ‘demands new readings of the most familiar modernist texts’, becoming close readers of the metaphors that structure animality, hierarchy and difference, noticing aspects of ‘the animal’ which elude human understanding. Kicking off day two, keynote Kari Weil (Wesleyan University) gave a vivid talk on animal magnetism: ‘the force that one animal body can have one another’. By moving through recent art (Berlinde de Bruyckere), French feminist philosophy and ideas from poststructuralism, Weil’s talk questioned the boundaries, entanglements and representations at stake in animal relationality. She considered the force of spectatorship, of contact and touch, memory, narrative and trauma, as well as the alien qualities within language itself that rub against our animal being.
A BEASTLY ETHOS
One recurring theme throughout the conference was that of ‘mastery’. Following Sarah Wood in her book Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces (2014), we ask what would a textuality or poetics without mastery look like? The papers of Beastly Modernism 2019 go some way to answering this question, or at the very least opening it up. Perhaps to be a beastly modernist requires something of a surrender of sovereignty, a recognition of the animal within ourselves (sated, happily, by the university’s delicious vegan catering and the hospitality of the Centre for Contemporary Arts, where our dinner was held on Friday) and an embrace of mobility, curiosity, fluctuation within thought, a shifting, plural, contaminated ‘I’ that bears its beastly echoes. To listen, share and challenge our familiar critical habitus.
Some delegates had the pleasure of a tour around the Hunterian’s Special Collections, facilitated by zoology curator Maggie Reilly. And so the conference began with this notion of the gaze and the touch: of what it means to look at what is held and preserved, to think through archivisation and curation within the critical force of our own work. It was clear to us that many exciting conversations were happening throughout the breaks and Q&A sessions, and delegates commented positively on the approachability of our speakers. We hope, then, that this might be something of what a ‘beastly welcome’ entails, and who knows what tracks, turns and paths of flight might happen next…
Professor Virginia Richter is looking to select a doctoral student (with an MA or equivalent degree) interested in pursuing their PhD in Modern English Literature under her supervision while working part-time as teaching-cum-research assistant in the Department of English at the University of Bern, Switzerland. You should be interested in undertaking research in one of Prof. Richter’s own areas of interest: English literature after 1800, literature and science, literary animal studies, gender studies, the blue humanities.
The role is a 50% appointment with a minimum salary of circa CHF39,437 per year (roughly £32,000) gross. It includes the obligation to teach some BA classes and would begin on 1st Feb 2020. Full details are in this PDF.
8-10 January 2020 at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, United Kingdom
18 July 2020 marks the tercentenary of the birth of Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne (1789), the bestselling account of the flora and fauna of his Hampshire parish. White encouraged a new way of looking at the environment, inspiring his readers to record the timings and interactions of plants and animals on their local patch. For that reason, he is sometimes called ‘the first ecologist’. But White was also a clergyman who administered the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, and who also took an interest in the folklore and beliefs current in his parish. For White, like many ‘natural-‘ or ‘physico-theologians’ of the period, the natural and the supernatural were inextricably entwined. Presenters at the 49th BSECS conference are therefore encouraged (but not required) to engage with any aspect of the theme of ‘Natural, Unnatural and Supernatural’ in the long, global eighteenth century.
Plenary speakers:
Donna Landry (University of Kent at Canterbury): ‘In one red burial blent’: The Natural, the Unnatural, and the Animal at Waterloo
Hannah Williams (QMUL): ‘The Religion Problem’
To submit a proposal, please visit https://www.bsecs.org.uk/conferences/annual-conference/submit-a-proposal/
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: 1 NOVEMBER 2019
All enquiries regarding the academic programme of the conference should be addressed to Dr Helen Williams via the BSECS email address: conference.academic@bsecs.org.uk
