Friday 27 March |
1200 |
Registration |
1300 |
Welcome by Kevin Warwick (Professor of Cybernetics, University of Reading) |
1315 |
Plenary 1 |
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Simon Conway Morris FRS (Professor of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge), ‘How nasty or daft can you get? The evolution wars in a tea-cup’ |
1415 |
Session 1 |
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Panel A ‘Approaches to literature and science’ |
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Jon Adams (London School of Economics), ‘What do “visionary” fictions actually predict?’ |
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Simon de Bourcier (University of East Anglia), ‘Fictional worlds, scientific hypotheses, and thought experiments’ |
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John Cartwright (University of Chester), ‘Seven types of interaction: an organising framework for approaching the science-literature dynamic’ |
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Panel B ‘Literature and science in the eighteenth century’ |
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Greg Lynall (University of Liverpool), ‘Swift’s alchemical satire and satiric alchemy’ |
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María Jesús Lorenzo Modia (University of Coruña, Spain), ‘Women and science in the eighteenth-century English periodical’ |
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Kate Roach (Nottingham University), ‘Science, reason and virtue in Romance of the Forest: the gothic origins of fictional detectives’ |
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Panel C ‘Science in post-war poetry’ |
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Michael Whitworth (Merton College, Oxford), ‘Science in late modernist poetry: the case of J. H. Prynne’ |
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Janine Rogers (Mount Allison University, Canada), ‘Genetic poetics: metaphors of genetics and literary form’ |
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Isabelle Travis (University of Reading), ‘ “These are the tranquilized fifties”: psychopharmacology and the poetic self’ |
1545 |
Tea and coffee |
1615 |
Session 2 |
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Panel D ‘Medicine and literature’ |
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Jane Darcy (King’s College, London),‘Beddoes as scientific biographer: Thomas Beddoes’ ‘Life’ of Dr John Brown’ |
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Gavin Budge (University of Hertfordshire), ‘Typologies of culture: early nineteenth-century medicine and the development of Victorian historicism’ |
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Monika Pietrzak-Franger (University of Siegen, Germany), ‘Syphilitic men: male hegemony, syphilis and degeneracy’ |
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Carolyn D. Williams (University of Reading), ‘Getting it wrong: first aid and the changing bodies of literature’ |
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Panel E ‘Literature, technology and experimentation in the long nineteenth century’ |
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Sharon Ruston (University of Salford), ‘ “[T]he most sublime and important of all the sciences”: Humphrey Davy’s chemistry and poetry’ |
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Stella Pratt-Smith (Balliol College, Oxford), ‘The “spiritual insight” of literary science: investigating transitions between technology, faith and fiction in nineteenth-century representations of electricity and experiment’ |
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Barri J. Gold (Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania), ‘Bleak House: the novel as engine’ |
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Jason David Hall (University of Exeter), ‘Mechanized metrics: from verse science to laboratory prosody, 1880-1918’ |
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Panel F ‘Humans and animals in post-Darwinian literature’ |
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Claire McKechnie (University of Edinburgh), ‘Geological underworlds: mythologizing the beast in Victorian palaeontology’ |
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Greta Depledge (Birkbeck College, University of London), ‘ “Had I known you were a vivisector, I should not only have refused to marry you, I should have declined to associate with you”: the vivisecting scientist in nineteenth-century literature’ |
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Candice Kent (University of Cambridge), ‘Intersecting identities: hybrids in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox’ |
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Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent), ‘“There is another smell of a nobody”: William Golding, the new people, and the other’ |
1800 |
Close for the day. Tables to be booked for dinner in restaurants in Reading |
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Saturday 28 March |
0900 |
Session 3 |
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Panel G ‘From natural theology to evolutionary anthropology: nineteenth-century encounters’ |
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Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent University), ‘The sound of the shaman: scientists and Indians in the Arctic’ |
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Debbie Bark (University of Reading), ‘Natural theology and the anxiety of knowledge in the writing of John and Ann Hawkshaw’ |
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Julia Reid (University of Leeds), ‘“[T]he wise-woman, the sibyl, the witch”: feminism, reform, and the uses of matriarchy in the late-Victorian period’ |
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Ronan McDonald (University of Reading), ‘Darwinism, degeneration and the Irish revival’ |
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Panel H ‘Science in global literatures’ |
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a) Sub-panel: ‘Literary representations of the cosmos in modern literature’ |
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Ben Peperkamp (VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands), ‘Popular scientific culture and the imaginary cosmic voyage: representations of astronomical knowledge in nineteenth-century narratives’ |
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Willemijn van der Linden (VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands), ‘ “Theoretical madhouse”: representations of astronomical knowledge in The discovery of heaven (1992) by Harry Mulisch’ |
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b) Sub-panel: |
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Christopher Damien Auretta (New University of Lisbon, Portugal), ‘Positivist belief and narrative disbelief in Machado de Assis’s novella The Psychiatrist’ |
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Sandor Klapcsik (University of Jyvaskyla, Finland), ‘Solaris as metacommentary: meta-science fiction and meta-science-fiction’ |
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Panel I ‘Physics in modern fiction’ |
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Elizabeth Throesch (York St John University), ‘The literary Fourth Dimension and the rise of modernism’ |
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Rachel Crossland (St John’s College, Oxford), ‘ “We are in sad need of a theory of human relativity”: D. H. Lawrence’s early novels in relation to Einstein’s theories of relativity’ |
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Katy Price (Anglia Ruskin University), ‘Coutts Brisbane and science fiction satire in the Yellow Magazine’ |
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Alice Bell (Imperial College, London), ‘Russell Stannard: scientist and children’s writer’ |
1045 |
Tea and coffee |
1115 |
Session 4 |
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Panel J ‘Science and early modern literature’ |
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Richard Marggraf Turley, Howard Thomas, and Jayne Archer (Aberystwyth University), ‘ “Darnell, and all the idle weedes that grow”: the politics of food supply and the literary imagination’ |
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Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno (University of Siena, Italy), ‘Attractive lawyers: the early reception of Gilbert’s magnetic theories in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I at the Inns of Court’ |
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Lawrence Lipking (Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois), ‘Spinning the circle: George Herbert on Francis Bacon’ |
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Samantha Murphy (University of Tennessee at Knoxville), ‘Bloody Shakespeare’ |
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Panel K ‘Science and knowledge in the nineteenth century’ |
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Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow), ‘Naming the unity of knowledge: the word ‘Cosmos’ and the unification of literature and science in mid-Victorian Britain’ |
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Adelene Buckland (University of Cambridge Victorian Studies Group), ‘ “High jinks”: Walter Scott and the culture of nineteenth-century geology’ |
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Melanie Keene (University of Cambridge), ‘ “Watt’s his name”: puns and nineteenth-century scientific education’ |
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Stuart Robertson (Uppsala University, Sweden), ‘ “joined up thinking”: Organising knowledge before the fin de siècle in the Encyclopædia Britannica, ninth edition’ |
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Panel L ‘Science on the modern stage’ |
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Jenni G. Halpin (University of California at Davis), ‘Faustian bargains in physics: a new Faust, before the atomic bomb’ |
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Naomi Rokotnitz (Bar-Ilan University, Israel), ‘Mirror neurons and the manipulation of embodied responses: disgust in The Libertine’ |
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Carina Bartleet (Oxford Brookes University), ‘On the origin of the speeches: evolution as trope in contemporary British drama’ |
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Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (St Catherine’s College, Oxford), ‘Gould as Darwin: speculations on a lost play’ |
1300 |
Lunch |
1400 |
Plenary 2 |
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Dame Gillian Beer (Professor Emerita, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge), ‘Extinction, now and then’ |
1500 |
Session 5 |
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Panel M ‘Botanising women: transmission, translation and European exchange’ |
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Sam George (University of Hertfordshire), ‘Epistolary exchange: Rousseau, Wakefield, and the instruction of ladies in Linnaean botany’ |
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Alison E. Martin (Martin-Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany), ‘ “Des Fleurs ne connoissent point de Révolution”: Priscilla Wakefield’s botanical writing in France’ |
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Heidi Hansson (Umeå University, Sweden), ‘Emily Lawless and botany as foreign science’ |
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Panel N ‘Dickens and anatomy’ |
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Helen Hauser (University of California), ’Articulating Pickwick: The anatomical construction of Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club’ |
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Andrew Mangham (University of Reading), ’Sketches by Boz: a Dickensian post mortem’ |
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Katherine Inglis (Birkbeck College, University of London), ’“So fair to look upon”: anatomizing Little Nell’ |
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Panel O ‘Biology in contemporary fiction’ |
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Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira (University of Aveiro, Portugal), ’Extra-uterine gestation in contemporary fiction and the visual arts’ |
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Justin Roby, ’Octavia Butler, embodied language, and partnership’ |
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Greg Garrard (Bath Spa University), ’Ian McEwan’s next novel’ |
1630 |
Tea and coffee |
1700 |
Plenary 3 |
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Patrick Parrinder (Professor of English, University of Reading), ‘Satanism and genetics: from Frankenstein to Haldane’s Daedalus and beyond’ |
1900 |
Conference Dinner |
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Sunday 29th March |
0900 |
Session 6 |
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Panel P ‘Science in nineteenth-century American literature’ |
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Graham Stott (Arab American University, Jenin, Palestine), ’Edgar Allan Poe and the luminiferous ether’ |
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Kelley Swain, ’Literary Tryworks: how Melville renders poetry from blubber’ |
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Heidi Kunz (Randolph College, Virginia), ’Miss Mitchell and Mr. Hawthorne (and Mr. Marvell)’ |
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Panel Q ‘Darwinism and degeneration in Victorian fiction’ |
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Helena Ifill (University of Sheffield), ’Victorian sensation diction: generating degeneration?’ |
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Ceri Hunter (University of Oxford), ’Cousin marriage, Victorian science and the sensation novel’ |
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Hélène Machinal (University of Bretagne Occidentale, France), ’New icons wanted : Jekyll, Holmes and Dracula revisited’ |
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Sara Clayson (Open University), ‘Sublime androgyny in Bram Stoker’s Dracula‘ |
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Panel R ‘Science and post-modernity’ |
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Folkert Degenring (University of Kassel, Germany), ‘Uncertain principles: on science in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ |
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Daniel Cordle (Nottingham Trent University), ‘Splitting the atom and the atomisation of narrative: Douglas Coupland’s ‘The Wrong Sun’ as Coda to the Cold War’ |
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John G. Hatch (University of Western Ontario, Canada), ‘Literary lnfluences in the misshaping of Robert Smithson’s entropic Shangri-La’ |
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Alistair Brown (Durham University), ‘The demonic posthuman: cybernetics, possession and postmodernism’ |
1045 |
Tea and coffee |
1115 |
Teaching literature and science: A roundtable discussion on contexts and cultures |
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Greg Lynall (University of Liverpool), Janine Rogers (Mount Allison University, Canada), Martin Willis (University of Glamorgan), Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (St Catherine’s College, Oxford), Laurence Davies (University of Glasgow) |
1215 |
Lunch |
1300 |
BSLS AGM |
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Including a presentation by Felicity Henderson (Royal Society Centre for the History of Science) and elections for BSLS committee and officers |
1400 |
Close |
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