BSLS 2010 programme

Conference Programme

Thursday, 8 April 2010
11.00-12.00 Conference Registration
12.00-12.15 Welcome (Allan Ingram)
12.15-13.30 Plenary 1: Patricia Waugh (Durham University), “Humanising: English Literary Studies and the Biologisation of Culture”; Chair: Peter Garratt
13.30-15.00 Parallel Sessions I
Panel 1: Literature, Science, and the Organisation of Knowledge Chair: Michael Whitworth
Alison Wood (King’s College, London), “How Nature ‘Up Close’ Became Lovely: The Aesthetics of Late Victorian Taxonomic Zoology”
Simon Robinson (Durham University), “‘The Geology of the Imagination’: Samuel Beckett and Aesthetic Stratigraphy”
Janine Rogers (Mount Allison University) and Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent), “‘Here is the Honey-Machine’: Plath’s Bee Poems and Entomology”
Panel 2: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Astronomy: Chair: John Holmes
Alex Murray (University of Exeter), “Vestiges of the Phoenix: De Quincey and Victorian Science”
Emily Alder (Edinburgh Napier University), “‘The Future was Eternal Night’: Entropy, Evolution, and the Death of the Sun in Camille Flammarion’s Omega and William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land”
Marie Banfield (Birkbeck College, University of London), “Observing the Sidereal Universe: Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Meredith, and Nineteenth-Century Astronomy”
Panel 3 Gendering Medicine, Medicalising Gender: Chair: Allan Ingram
Elaine Hobby (Loughborough University), “Science and Literature in The Birth of Mankind”
Sara Read (Loughborough University), “Re-Reading Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in Scientific Medical Context”
Lena Wånggren (University of Edinburgh), “Female Intuition and Male Diagnosis: Gendering Medical Knowledge in Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade (1900)”
15.00-15.30 Tea and Coffee
15.30-17.00 Parallel Sessions II
Panel 4 Satirising Science Chair: Felix Sprang
Greg Lynall (University of Liverpool), “Talking Flowers and Topsy-Turvy Trees: Swift, Shadwell, and Robert Boyle’s Occasional Reflections”
Cristiano Turbil (University of Kent), “Samuel Butler and the Case of Erewhon: When Evolution Meets Literature”
Nessa Collinge O’Connor (University College, Dublin), “Contemporary Humanism in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth”
Panel 5 Narrativising Nineteenth-Century Science Chair: Emily Alder
Melanie Keene (Homerton College, University of Cambridge), “On Familiarity”
Erin Snyder (University of Sheffield), “The Time Machine: Narrative of Hypothesis”
Keir Waddington (Cardiff University), “More like Cooking than Science: Inside the Laboratory, Britain 1880-1914”
Panel 6 Evolutionary Hypotheses Chair: Leigh Wetherall Dickson
Richard Somerset (Université de Nancy), “The Popular ‘History of Life’: Two French Versions”
Steve McLean, “‘The Golden Fly’: Emile Zola’s Nana and Degeneration”
Margareth Hagen (University of Bergen), “Primo Levi’s Fables of Evolution”
17.00-18.30 Parallel Sessions III
Panel 7 Dramatising Science Chair: Adam Trexler
Mike Vanden Heuvel (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “‘To Infinity, and Beyond!’ Can Theater Play with Science?”
William W. Demastes (Louisiana State University), “Staged Procedures: Tom Stoppard’s Theatricalized Thought Experiments”
Fransesca Rayner (Universidade do Minho) and Palmira Fontes da Costa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), “Dramatizing Scientific Debate: Shelagh Stephenson’s An Experiment with an Air Pump”
Panel 8 Nineteenth-Century Sciences of the Mind Chair: Martin Willis
Jason David Hall (University of Exeter), “Prosodic Protuberances”
Nazia Parveen (University of Leicester), “Blue China, Knee Breaches, Sunflowers, and Lilies: The Practical Application of Psychology in the Works of Oscar Wilde”
Vike Martina Plock (Northumbria University), “Edith Wharton and Neurology”
Panel 9 Literature and Physics Chair: Jenni G. Halpin
Simon de Bourcier (University of East Anglia), “The Æther in Fiction from Poe to Pyncheon”
Elizabeth Throesch (York St. John University), “Invisible Men and Women: Experiments in the Fourth Dimension”
Peter Middleton (University of Southampton), “Physics for Poets: American Poetry and Physics in the 1960s”
18.30-20.00 Ann Lingard, “Putting Science into Novels” Moderation: Kelley Swain
Followed by Wine Reception
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Friday, 9 April 2010
09.00-10.00 Parallel Sessions IV
Panel 10 Representing the Scientist Chair: Mike Vanden Heuvel
Jenni G. Halpin (University of California, Davis), “Projecting Destruction: Making Decisions in The Einstein Project”
Carina Bartleet (Oxford Brookes University), “Spectacular Anatomies, and Unnatural Sciences: Faust in Contemporary British Theatre”
Panel 11 Human-Animal Borders Chair: Verity Hunt
Claire Charlotte McKechnie (University of Edinburgh), “Monsters Manufactured!?: Humanised Animals, Freak Culture, and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle”
Aline Ferreira (University of Aveiro), “Human Zoos and Trees of Life: Darwinian Tropes in Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo (1924), Boulle’s Planet of the Apes (1963), and Self’s Great Apes (1997)”
Panel 12 Scientific Encounters in Twentieth-Century Poetry Chair: Janine Rogers
Michael Whitworth (Merton College, Oxford), “Science in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Late Poetry”
John Holmes (University of Reading), “Evolution, Reproduction and Deep Time: The Natural Universe of Judith Wright”
10.00-10.30 Tea and Coffee
10.30-11.30 Parallel Sessions V
Panel 13 Darwin’s Legacies Chair: Alison Wood
Angelique Richardson (University of Exeter), “Hardy and the Eugenists”
Ayako Mizuo (Prefectural University of Kumamoto and University of Leicester), “The Contingency of History: Gender and Darwinian Temporality in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts”
Panel 14 The Science of Sleep Chair: Charlotte Holden
Filip Krajník (Durham University), “‘We are spirits of another sort’: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Context of Medical Fiction”
Anke Sandleben-Krah (University of Marburg), “‘I spy with my little eye’: Jonathan Coe’s The House of Sleep as a Synthesis of Sleep Research and Narrative Fiction”
Panel 15 Aestheticising Science? Chair: Lisa Otty
Felix Sprang (University of Hamburg), “‘I pray you make this thing plaine unto me’: Baroque Science Rendered in Plain Style: A Seventeenth-Century Paradox?”
Amanda Caleb (University of Tennessee), “‘Everybody Nowadays Talks about Evolution’: The Literary Darwinism of Grant Allen”
11.30-12.45 Plenary 2: Nick Daly, (University College Dublin), “Fireworks and Volcanoes: Imagining Modernity as Disaster” Chair: Vike Martina Plock
12.45-13.30 Lunch
13.30-15.00 Parallel Sessions VI
Panel 16 Representing Mars Chair: Jason David Hall
Martin Willis (University of Glamorgan), “Waves of Seeing: Astronomical and Fictional Observations of Mars, 1890-1920”
Laurence Davies (University of Glasgow), “Red, Dead, or Neither: Doing Martian Science”
Conor Reid (Trinity College, Dublin), “Under the Moons of Mars: The Influence of Astronomy on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoon Series”
Panel 17 Gaming and Game Theory Chair: Rob Bullard
Michael Wainwright (Lancaster University), “Playing for Real: A Game Theory Reading of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood”
Thijs van den Berg (University of Amsterdam), “The Story of War: Narrative Technology in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and Miniature Wargaming”
Alistair Brown (Durham University), “Frederic Jameson and the Gangster: The Computer Game Grand Theft Auto as a Cognitive Map of the Postmodern Condition”
Panel 18 Literature and Psychiatry Chair: Clark Lawlor
Jonathan Andrews (Newcastle University), “‘Brooding by the Fire in her Lonely Chamber’: The Medico-Legal Sub-Texts of Brooding, Monomania, and Pyromania in Lady Audley’s Secret”
Michelle Faubert (University of Manitoba), “John Ferriar’s Psychology, James Hogg’s Justified Sinner, and the Gay Science of Horror-Writing”
Matthew Eddy (Durham University), “Moral Therapy for Children: Space, Form, and the Pedagogical Relevance of Readership in Late Enlightenment Scotland”
Colin Baker (Durham University), “Print Culture, Narrative Structure, and Psychiatric Authority: Exploring James Wakley’s Editorship of The Lancet in the Late Victorian Era”
15.00-15.30 Tea and Coffee
15.30-17.00 Parallel Sessions VII
Panel 19 Literature and Technology Chair: Richard Terry
Helen Williams (Northumbria University), “The Hand of Technology: Uses of the Manicule in Tristram Shandy”
Courtney Salvey (University of Kent), “Popular Technology: The Nineteenth-Century Literatures of Technology, 1824-1859”
Verity Hunt (University of Reading), “‘The Wizard of Menlo Park’: Thomas Edison: Showman, Magician, Inventor”
Panel 20 Hypothetical Worlds Chair: Keir Waddington
Folkert Degenring (University of Kassel), “Special Circumstances: Mind, Body, and Gender in Recent Science Fiction”
Russell Jones (University of Edinburgh), “‘A Home in Space’: Teleportation and Space Exploration in Edwin Morgan’s Science Fiction Poetry”
Carrie Grant (Durham University), “It was like so, but wasn’t: The Necessity of the Human in Richard Power’s Galatea 2.2”
Panel 21 Postmodern Aesthetics and Global Catastrophe Chair: Peter Fifield
Dan Cordle (Nottingham Trent University), “Protest/Protect: Theorising 1980s British and American Nuclear Literature”
Rob Bullard (Northumbria University), “The Technological Accident in Contemporary Fiction and Film”
Adam Trexler (University of Exeter) “Literary Atmospheres: Science and Politics in Climate Change Fiction”
17.00-17.45 BSLS AGM
17.45-19.15 Parallel Sessions VIII
Panel 22 Cognitive Literary Studies Chair: Stella Pratt-Smith
Terence H. W. Shih, “Cognitive Science: Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813)”
Peter Garratt (Northumbria University), “Victorian Cognitive Theory and the Novel”
Lisa Otty (University of Dundee), “On Ambiguity: Modernism, Literature, and Cognition”
Panel 23 Virginia Woolf, Modernism, and Science Chair: Frederico Sabatini
Randi Koppen (University of Bergen), “Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, and the Politics of Science”
Teresa Prudente (University of Turin), “Voicing the Inhuman: Lucretius, Heisenberg, and The Waves”
Rachel Crossland (St. John’s College, Oxford), “Individuals Suspended in a Mass: Brownian Motion as a Model for Literary Crowds in the Works of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf”
Panel 24 Literature, Mathematics, and Science Chair: Melanie Keene
Francesca De Lucia (St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University), “‘Tell Me about Mathematics’: The Representation of Science in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star”
Nina Engelhardt (University of Edinburgh), “Mathematics, Reality, and Fiction in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day”
Verónica Pacheco (Universidad Pablo de Olavide), “Science in Literature: Jeanette Winterson”
From 19.45 Dinner in the Assembly Rooms, Newcastle
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Saturday, 10 April 2010
9.00-10.30 Parallel Sessions IX
Panel 25 James Joyce and Science Chair: Vike Martina Plock
Armando Caracheo (University of Bologna), “On Joyce, Simultaneity, Viewpoints, and Maps”
Katherine Ebury (University of York), “Beyond the Spectrum: Spectroscopy in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake”
Frederico Sabatini (University of Turin), “‘Sifted Science Will Do Your Art Good’: Non-Euclidean Geometries in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake”
Panel 26 Psychology and Somatism Chair: Peter Garratt
Charlotte Holden (Northumbria University), “‘[H]e loved a jest in his heart’: Laughter as Treatment for Melancholy in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy”
Louise Lee (King’s College, London), “Irrational Recreations: Herbert Spencer’s Experiments in Laughter”
Margery Vibe Skagen (University of Bergen), “Symptoms of Hysteria in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems”
Panel 27 Nineteenth-Century Science and Society Chair: Courtney Salvey
Elio Di Piazza (University of Palermo), “Exploring a Theoretical Space: Erewhon and the Utopian Adventure”
Barri Gold (Muhlenberg College), “The Family Machine”
Stella Pratt-Smith (Balliol College, Oxford), “The Power of ‘Plate’: Cultural Conflict and Electroplating in the Writing by Robert Hunt and William Makepeace Thackeray”
10.30-11.00 Tea and Coffee
11.00-12.00 Parallel Sessions X
Panel 28 Medicine and Literature in Conversation Chair: Alex Murray
Ana Santandreu-Arana (University of the Balearic Islands), “Reconsidering the Limits of Science: Mary Shelley’s Journey to the Un/Known”
Angela Woods (Durham University), “A Discordant Chorus: Thirty Years of First Person Accounts of Schizophrenia Bulletin”
Panel 29 Science and the Victorian Periodical Press Chair: Amanda Caleb
Will Tattersdill (King’s College, London), “‘Easily Delineated Limits’: Science, Fiction, and the Late-Victorian Periodical”
Jonathan Cranfield (University of Kent), “Chivalric Machines: The Boer War, The Strand Magazine, and the Physical Culture Debate”
Panel 30 Reflections on Science in Early-Twentieth-Century Literature Chair: Teresa Prudente
Christopher Damien Auretta (New University of Lisbon), “Technology and Modern Poetics in the Work of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935)”
John Cartwright (University of Chester), “‘Blessed is he whose mind had power to probe/The causes of things’: A E Housman, Lucretius, and the 1909 Darwin Centenary”
12.00-12.45 Lunch
12.45-14.00 Plenary 3: John Dupré (University of Exeter), “C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures Debate after 50 Years” Chair: Angelique Richardson
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