BSLS 2011 programme

Saturday 9 April 2011: The Pitt Building, Cambridge

PLENARY WELCOME SESSION: 9.00-9.10 (Darwin Room)

FIRST SESSION: 9.15-10.45.

[1a] Geology and long durée (Darwin Room) Chair: Alice Jenkins.

Adelene Buckland (UEA), ‘Wooers, winners and cave-dwellers: the novel and the geological map’

Ralph O’Connor (Aberdeen), ‘The evolutionary epic: the greatest story never told?’

Edward Sugden (Oxford), ‘“The True Time of the Rising and Setting of All His Stars”: Herman Melville’s Mardi and astronomical time’

[1b] Romantic Poetry (Newton Room) Chair: Gavin Budge.

Sharon Ruston (Salford), ‘Romantic Poetry: Creativity and Vitality’

Terence H.W. Shih (Durham), ‘Neural Sublimity: Sexuality in Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819)’

Felix Sprang (Hamburg), ‘The “Voluntary” Movement of Plants in Romantic Poetry and Early 19th-Century Botany.’

[1c] In Conversation: Science and Canadian Poetry (Walpole Room) Chair: John Holmes.

Amanda Jernigan (McMaster), ‘Poetic Ecology / Ecological Poetics: The Outram-Bateson Correspondence’

Janine Rogers (Mount Allison), ‘Neighboring Paths: Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time and Robyn Sarah’s Questions About the Stars

Jeffrey Donaldson (McMaster), ‘The Selfish Metaphor: Reading Practice and Evolutionary Algorithms’

[1d] Eighteenth-Century Representations (Palmerston Room) Chair: Claire McKechnie.

Gregory Lynall (Liverpool), ‘Alchemy and Allusion in Swift’s Poetry’

Simona Gîrleanu (University Lille 3), ‘To describe or to define? Representations of London at the turn of the eighteenth century’

Sam George (Hertfordshire), ‘Animated beings: entomology and the familiar letter in juvenile literature for girls’

REFRESHMENTS: 10.45-11.15.

SECOND SESSION: 11.15-13.00.

[2a] Nineteenth-Century Science and Poetry (Darwin Room) Chair: Barri Gold.

Erin Snyder (Sheffield), ‘“Caliban Upon Setebos” and its representations of science and religion’

Emily Alder (Edinburgh Napier), ‘How to avoid extinction: closed systems and the struggle for existence’

Jordan Kistler (KCL), ‘The use of the “exotic” in the poetry of the late-Victorian naturalist Arthur O’Shaughnessy’

Dawn Sanders (Charles Darwin Trust), ‘Carnivorous plants: science and the literary imagination’

[2b] Modern Writing and Science: Plays and Playing (Newton Room) Chair: Kirsten Shepherd-Barr.

Seb Franklin (Anglia Ruskin), ‘People and/as Machines: Beckett and Cultural Cybernetics’

Naomi Rokotnitz (Bar-Ilan), ‘The Epistemic Advantages of Embodied Receptiveness in 33 Variations’

Alistair Brown (Durham), ‘No Sense of an Ending: Frank Kermode and Computer Game Narratives’

Laura Dietz (Anglia Ruskin), ‘Adaptive Fiction: how can authors respond to questions on evolutionary purpose of fiction?’

[2c] Forensic Fictions (Walpole Room) Chair: Martin Willis.

Neil Pemberton (Manchester), ‘Bloodhounds and Bloodhound Detection in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’’

Ian Burney (Manchester), ‘“Our Environment in Miniature”: Dust, Detection, and the Birth of the Modern Crime Scene’

David Kirby (Manchester), ‘Dead Men do Tell Tales: Forensic Science and Modern Storytelling in Television Production’

Michael Wainwright (Birmingham), ‘Before and Beyond “The Final Problem”: Game Theory and Sherlock Holmes’

[2d] Turn-of-the-century visions (Palmerston Room) Chair: Alice Jenkins.

Jacob Orrje, ‘Characters Described. Images of the Artist and the Scientist in Three Works by Emile Zola’

Amanda Caleb (Misericordia), ‘“A City of Nightmares”: Arthur Machen’s Londonphobias’

Maxim Shadurski (Edinburgh), ‘Religion and Science in R. H. Benson’s Novel The Dawn of All (1911)’

LUNCH: 13.00-14.00 (and Announcement of BSLS Book Prize for 2010.)

PLENARY SESSION (Darwin Room): 14.00-15.00
George Rousseau (Oxford University): ‘Leonardo’s Children; or, was polymathic knowledge ever intrinsic to Literature and Science?’

THIRD SESSION: 15.00-16.30.

[3a] Victoriana (Darwin Room) Chair: Janine Rogers.

Barri Gold (Muhlenberg), ‘Energy, ecosystems and Victorian Literature’

John Holmes (Reading), ‘Thoughts towards Nature: science and Pre-Raphaelitism in The Germ (1850)’

Martin Willis (Glamorgan), ‘Gothic Artefacts: Archaeology and the Imagination’

Andrew Mangham (Reading), ‘”God’s Truth”: Darkness and the philosophy of science in Oliver Twist

[3b] Science and Modern Poetry (Newton Room) Chair: Peter Middleton.

Donald Gibson (St Andrews), ‘Pseudo-statement or Creative Misreading: What Happens to Science in Poetry?’

Victoria Paine (St Andrews), ‘”A new species of biography”: the poetry of Ruth Padel and Emily Ballou’

Josie Gill (Cambridge), ‘Francis Crick, Race, and the Poetry of Richard Nixon’

[3c] Forms of Popularisation (Walpole Room) Chair: Ralph O’Connor.

Rachel Crossland (Oxford), ‘’[T]o enlighten rather than to teach’: W. A. Shenstone, Popular Science and The Cornhill Magazine, 1903-1908’

Paola Spinozzi (Ferrara), ‘Scientists as Narrators. Epistemology and Aesthetics in Contemporary British Science Writing’

Carina Bartleet (Oxford Brookes), ‘‘Life Stories: Decoding the Narrative or Performing Science?’

[3d] Medicine in History and Literature (Palmerston Room) Chair: Sharon Ruston.

Gavin Budge (Hertfordshire), ‘Medicine and Political Economy in Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook: Irritability and the Condition of England’

Chisomo Kalinga (KCL), ‘Cultural Representations of HIV/AIDS: A Literary Study’

Claire McKechnie (Edinburgh), ‘Bodily Malfunctions: Cancer and the Self Out of Control’

REFRESHMENTS: 16.30-17.00.

FOURTH SESSION: 17.00-18.30.

[4a] Science and Drama (Darwin Room) Chairs: Steve Abbott and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

‘The Drama of Experiment: Galileo on the Modern Stage’

Liliane Campos, Steve Abbott, Craig Baxter, and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr.

[4b] Americana/Apocalypse (Newton Room) Chair: Peter Middleton.

Daniel Cordle (Nottingham Trent), ‘The City on the Mesa: Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project and United States Fiction’

Thijs van den Berg (Amsterdam), ‘Business is Good at the Market Place’s Demise: BioShock and the Representation of the End of Capitalism’

Justin Katko (Queens’ College, Cambridge), ‘Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger and Caius Science of the 1960s.’

[4c] Martian/Venusian (Walpole Room) Chair: Katy Price.

Will Tattersdill (KCL), ‘Escape velocity: realism in Garrett P. Serviss’s counterattack on Mars, 1898’

Conor Reid (Trinity College Dublin), “A veil of dignity bespoke her blood”: eugenics in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Venus series

[4d] Psychology and Phrenology (Palmerston Room) Chair: Martin Willis.

Simon de Bourcier (UEA), ‘’Every man’s destiny stands written on his forehead’: Phrenology, Physiognomy, and the Representation of Character in Nineteenth-Century Fiction.’

Cristiano Turbil (Kent), ‘Der Sandman: When Psychology meets a novel’

Monika Class (KCL), ‘Lumps and bumps’: phrenology in David Copperfield.’

Peter Garratt (Northumbria), ‘Neural Victorians: Cognitive Science and Nineteenth-Century Fictional Worlds’.

BSLS ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING:18.30-19.15 (Darwin Room)

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