Conference Programme
Friday 24 March
12.00-2.00 REGISTRATION
2.00-2.45
David Amigoni (Keele), ‘Literate, too literate’: Darwinian literary criticism, or why Madame Bovary’s ovaries are unimportant to Ian McEwan’s Saturday’
2.45-4.00
Panel 1: The Novel and Scientific Authority
Chair: Bernd Klaehn (Bochum)
Jon Adams (LSE), ‘The Use of Scientific Facts in Fictional Writing’
Richard Hamblyn (Nottingham) ‘Natural Knowledge and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’
Panel 2: Modern Poetry and Science
Saba Razvi (Southern California), ‘Synthetic Form & Deviant Transcendence:
Interfaces Between 21st Century Poetics, Science, & Print Technology’
Peter Middleton (Southampton) , ‘Poetry and the Authority of Contemporary Science’
Louisa Gairn (Edinburgh), ‘ ‘Planetary Consciousness’: Hugh MacDiarmid, Patrick Geddes and the Poetics of Ecology’
Panel 3: Twentieth-century Fiction and Science
Laurence Davies (Glasgow), ‘The Science of Dystopia: Forster and Zamyatin’
Andrew Radford (Glasgow), ‘Making Wessex Novel Again: Mary Butt’s Artistic Anthropology’
Milan Jaros (Newcastle), ‘Post-Mechanical Models of Corporeality and Applications of Analogy in Literary Narratives’
4.00-4.30 TEA
4.30-6.00
Panel 4: Newton
Greg Lynall (Liverpool), ‘John Arbuthnot’s The Humble Petition of the Colliers and Newtonian Monopolies’
Bernd Klaehn (Bochum), ‘Principia Narrata: Newton’s Fictions about Science’
Panel 5: Children, Literature and Science
Chair: Farah Mendlesohn (Middlesex)
Amanda Mordavsky (Sheffield), ‘The Young Man’s Book of Amusement and the Future of Victorian Popular Science’
Alice Bell (Imperial), ‘Anachronistic Fantastic: Disrupted Historical Codes and Constructions of Ideas about Science’
Andy Sawyer (Liverpool), ‘Science Storied / Stories of Science: Terry Pratchett and Popular Science Writing’
6.00-7.00 Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent), ‘Red Men’s Bones and What White Men Saw in Them’
7.00 DINNER in a local restaurant
Saturday 25 March
10.00-11.00 REGISTRATION
9.00-10.30
Panel 6: Modernist Fiction and Science
Chair: Michael Whitworth
Ludwig Schnauder (Vienna), ‘The Scientific World View in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent’
Jarmila Mildorf (Stuttgart), ‘Metaphors of Magic and the Scientific Imagination: Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith’
Gerardine Meaney (UCD), ‘Orts, Fragments and Waves’: New Physics, Narrative Time and Quotation in Between The Acts’
Panel 7: Seventeenth Century Literature and Science (I)
Michelle DiMeo (Warwick), ‘The Literary Significance of Early Modern Women’s Medical Receipt Books’
Judy A. Hayden ( Tampa), ‘As Far as a Woman’s Reasoning May Go’: Aphra Behn and the New Philosophy’
Sophie Bouvier (Birmingham), ‘Seventeenth Century Theories of Drama in France and England: The Geometrical Pattern’
10.30-11.00 COFFEE
11.00-12.00
Panel 8: Nanotechnology
Chair: Andy Sawyer (Liverpool)
Mark Erickson (Brighton), ‘Science fictions, science and cultural studies’
Todd Avery (Massachusetts – Lowell), ‘Harmonizing our Powers: Or, Itty-Bitty Bobbleheads and Other Strange Creatures: Literature and Nanoscience Across the Two Cultures’
Panel 9: Seventeenth Century Literature and Science (II)
Chair: Judy A. Hayden
(Tampa)
Natalie Kaoukji (Cambridge), ‘Paper Flights: Literary Devices for Natural Philosophy’
Melanie Ord (West of England), ‘Experience and Experimentation: The New Science and Seventeenth-Century Travel’
Panel 10: Materiality and Materialism
Ian Bell (Keele), ‘Apparitions and Phantasmagoria: Pound’s Homage to the Fourth Dimension’
Daniel Brown (Western Australia), ‘Science and Nonsense: James Clerk Maxwell’s Lucretian Levity’
12.00 –1.00 First roundtable on teaching literature, science and film
John Holmes (Reading), Rebecca Stott (Anglia Ruskin), Daniel Cordle (Nottingham Trent)
1.00-2.00 LUNCH
2.00 –2.45
Chair: Alice Jenkins
Alan Rauch (North Carolina), ‘The Space of Information in the Early Nineteenth Century: Roads, Bridges, and Streets of Knowledge’
2.45-4.15
Panel 11: Romanticism, History and Science
Chair: Sharon Ruston
Jane Darcy (KCL), ‘William Cowper’s Melancholy and Madness’
Jonathan Taylor (Loughborough), ‘On History, Chaos and Carlyle’
Sharon Ruston (Bangor), ‘Natural History, Unitarianism and Wollstonecraft’
Panel 12: Science and History in Contemporary Drama
Chair: Liliane Campos (Ecole Normale Superieur)
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (Birmingham), ‘How to Do Things with Science in the Theatre’
Frederique Ait-Touati (Paris 4 – Sorbonne), ‘A Theatre for the Scientific Age’: Experiment and History in Brecht’s Life of Galileo’
Liliane Campos (Ecole Normale Superieur), ‘This is not Science. This is Storytelling’: Science as Narrative Structure in British History Plays’
4.15-4.45 TEA
4.45-5.30 Rebecca Stott (Anglia Ruskin), ‘On Curiosity’
6.00 DINNER in a local restaurant
Sunday 26 March
9.30-10.15
Chair: Alan Rauch
Nigel Leask (Glasgow), ‘Robert Burns and the Stimulant Regime’
10.15-10.45 COFFEE
10.45-12. 15
Panel 13: Evolution
Chair: Martin Willis (Glamorgan)
Adelene Buckland (Oxford), ‘Recontextualising Darwin in Nineteenth-Century Literary Studies’
Heather Schell (George Washington), ‘The Descent of Man: Evolution, Virility and the Rise of the Predator in Late Victorian England’
Mary Noble (Princeton), ‘George Eliot and Anthropology: ‘Marriage by Capture’ in Middlemarch’
Panel 14: Science in Modern Poetry
Chair: Michael Whitworth
Kory Wein (Wisconsin – Platteville), ‘The Grand Narrative of Science in Alfred Noyes’s Watchers of the Sky’
Hannah Tracy (Oregon), ‘Eugenic Poetics: Degeneration, Aesthetic Education, and Lamarckian Evolution in Yeats’s Early and Late Poetry’
Suzanne Black (Purdue), ‘Inspired by Anaerobes: Science, Poetry and Worldview in W. H. Auden’
Reena Sastri (Boston), ‘The Changing Light at Sandover’: James Merill’s Scientific Myth’
12.15-1.30 LUNCH: Including business meeting to set up the BSLS
1.30-2.45
Panel 15: Doing Literature and Science
Daniel Cordle (Nottingham Trent), ‘Bridges and Boundaries: (Dis)Entaging the Histories of Literature’
John Holmes (Reading), ‘Science and Poetry: A Debate within Modern Darwinism’
Michael Whitworth (Oxford), ‘The Uses of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Poetry’
Panel 16: Nineteenth Century Literature and Science
Chair: Alan Rauch
Claire Brock (Leicester), ‘Reading Mary Somerville’
Gowan Dawson (Leicester), ‘Edward Dowden and Henry Maudsley on Aestheticism: Problematizing the ‘One Culture’ Model of Literature and Science Scholarship’
Martin Willis (Glamorgan), ‘The Invisible Germ of Vampirism: The Microscope, Theories of Disease and Bram Stoker’s Dracula’
2.45-3.45 Second roundtable on teaching literature and science
Gowan Dawson (Leicester), Michael Whitworth (Oxford), Barbara Crowther (Wolverhampton)
3.45 CLOSE OF CONFERENCE
