British Society for Literature and Science
2014 Conference Programme
10 April
Registration: 11.00-12.50
Welcome: 12.50-13.00 (Lecture Theatre M)
First Plenary Session: 13.00-14.00 (Lecture Theatre M)
Jim Al-Khalili (University of Surrey) – “Science and Rationalism in Medieval Arabic Texts”
Panel Session One: 14.00-15.30
Panel 1 – The Poetry and Fiction of Scientists (Lecture Theatre B)
Daniel Brown (University of Southampton) – “Mary Somerville as Model ‘Scientist’ and Poetic Muse”
Annja Neumann (University of Cambridge) – “A Love Affair with Science: A Poetic Dialogue between Edgar Allan Poe and John Herschel”
Pascal Nouvel (Université Paul Valéry, Montpelier) – “Chemistry between Science and Literature”
Panel 2 – Sensation and Science in Victorian Fiction (Lecture Theatre H)
Emanuela Ettorre (Università Degli Studi G. d’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara) – “Contemplating Pain: Science and Sensationalism in Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science”
Jonathan Potter (University of Leicester) – “‘How do You Account for it?’: Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story (1862) and the Dissemination of Science in the Popular Press”
Kalika Sands (University of Oxford) – “The Problems of Passion: Brain Fever and Environment in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture”
Panel 3 – Narratives and Images of Medicine (Lecture Theatre J)
Angela Kennedy (Open University) – “Psychogenic Explanations for Physical Illnesses in Literature and Medicine: An Unfortunate Case of Seduction”
Emilie Taylor-Brown (University of Warwick) – “(Re)Constructing the Knights of Science: Parasitologists and their Literary Imaginations”
Corinna Wagner (University of Exeter) – “Artists, Anatomists, and the Transparent Body”
Coffee and Tea: 15.30-16.00
Panel Session Two: 16.00-17.30
Panel 4 – Reading with Dinosaurs (Lecture Theatre B)
Katherine Ford (University of Reading) – “Drawing Dinosaurs: Descriptions and Images of Prehistory in Nineteenth-Century Scientific and Popular Literature”
Melanie Keene (University of Cambridge) – “Dinosaurs Don’t Die: the Crystal Palace Monsters in Children’s Literature, 1854-2001”
Will Tattersdill (University of Birmingham) – “The Life and Times of the Megalosaurus: Prehistoric Monsters, Popular Culture, and the Temporal Relation of Fact and Fiction”
Panel 5 – The Sound of Science (Lecture Theatre H)
Peter Garratt (Durham University) – “Dickens and Hallucination”
Sarah Hanks (University of Oxford) – “From Podium to Page: Scientific Speech and Textual Performance in the Mid-to-Late Nineteenth Century”
Verity Hunt (University of Southampton) – “‘A Book to Read with the Eyes Shut’: Reading Nineteenth-Century Audio Books in the Short Stories of Edward Bellamy and Octave Uzanne”
Panel 6 – The Place of Medicine (Lecture Theatre J)
Vanessa Costa e Silva Schmitt (University of Geneva) – “Dr Benassis and his Sanitarian Work as a Country Doctor and Mayor in Balzac’s Le Médecin de Campagne”
Ally Crockford (University of Edinburgh) – “Dissecting Edinburgh: Literature and Medicine in the Scottish Capital”
Laurence Davies (University of Glasgow) – “‘Public Health . . . It’s the Emerging Field’: Epidemics in Barrett, Giono, and Haggard”
Panel 7 – Twentieth-Century Poetry and Science (Lecture Theatre M)
Peter Middleton (University of Southampton) – “Which Science, Which Literature? Tracing the Impact of the Social Sciences on Postwar Poetry”
Fathi Nasaif (University of Reading) – “Literature and Science in Muriel Rukeyser’s Writings”
Gi Taek Ryoo (Chungbuk National University) – “T. S. Eliot: Entropy and the Arrow of Time”
Panel Session Three: 17.30-19.00
Panel 8 – Medieval Science (Lecture Theatre B)
Neelam Hussain (University of Birmingham) – “Secretum Secretorum: The Secrets of Statecraft and Science”
Carl Kears (King’s College London) and James Paz (University of Leeds) – “The Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle: An Early Science Fiction?”
Janine Rogers (Mount Allison University) – “Reading the Redpath: The Medieval Poetics of a Victorian Natural History Museum”
Panel 9 – Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Science (Lecture Theatre H)
Alison Cardinale (University of Sydney) – “Coleridge and Romanticism after Heisenberg”
Wolfgang Funk (Leibniz University, Hanover) – “‘Fitness for a Freedom Yet to Be’: Evolution, Mutual Aid and Emancipation in the Work of Louisa Sarah Bevington”
John Holmes (University of Reading) – “William Morris, Materialism and Empiricism: Reading The Earthly Paradise in the Light of Science”
Panel 10 – Science and Temporality (Lecture Theatre J)
Irmtraud Huber (University of Berne) – “On the Limits of Greenwich Mean Time, or The Failure of a Modernist Revolution”
Courtney Salvey (University of Kent) – “Technology, Time, and Genre: Early Nineteenth-Century Histories of Inventions”
Elodie Rousselot (University of Portsmouth) – “Experimenting with the Past in Contemporary Neo-Victorian Fiction”
Panel 11 – Defining Literature and Science (Lecture Theatre M)
Eleanor Sandry (Curtin University) – “Minding the Gap: Creating New Knowledge by Respecting Disciplinary Difference”
Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent) – “NICE or Nasty? Science in the Fiction and Theology of C. S. Lewis”
Martin Willis (University of Westminster) – “Before Beer and After the Financial Crisis”
Conference Dinner: 19.00 (Hillside Restaurant)
11 April
Panel Session Four: 9.00-10.30
Panel 12 – Seeing Things: Aspects of Perception in Science and Literature (Lecture Theatre B)
Will Abberley (University of Oxford) – “Jungle Deceptions: Seeing Natural Mimicry in Victorian Scientific Travel Narratives”
Franziska Kohlt (University of Oxford) – “‘How Slight the Line, if Line There Be’: Visual Perception and (Un-)reality in Victorian Psychology and Literature”
Laura Ludtke (University of Oxford) – “Sophrosyne and Artificial Light in Surveillance Fiction of the Early Twentieth Century”
Panel 13 – Other Worlds (Lecture Theatre H)
Simon de Bourcier (Independent Scholar) – “Possible Worlds and Environmental Scenarios: The Case of Flight Behaviour”
Barri J. Gold (Muhlenberg College) – “The War of the Worlds: New Perspectives on Resource Management”
Yi-Chun Liu (University of Kent) – “A Moral Response to Science: Utopian Representations in the New Atlantis and the New Story of the Stone”
Panel 14 – Neuronarratives (Lecture Theatre J)
Anna Auguscik and Anton Kirchhofer (University of Oldenburg) – “Neuroscience, Anxiety and Meta-Narrative in Recent British Neuronovels: David Lodge’s Thinks… and Ian McEwan’s Saturday”
Angus Fletcher (Ohio State University) – “Against Mind-Reading: A New Cognitive Model of the Ethical Function of Novels”
Natalie Roxburgh (University of Oldenburg) – “Richard Powers’s Anxious Neuroscientists”
Panel 15 – Science, Politics, and Education (Lecture Theatre M)
Carina Bartleet (Oxford Brookes University) – “The Empty Space is not (a)void: Scottish Theatre and the Space Race”
Daniel Cordle (Nottingham Trent University) – “‘Brothers [and Sisters] in the Land’: 1980s Nuclear Fiction for Children and Young Adults”
Jenni Halpin (Savannah State University) – “‘Time to Consider’: Educating the Deciders with the ‘Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse’”
Coffee and Tea: 10.30-11.00
Panel Session Five: 11.00-12.00
Panel 16 – Fiction and Physics (Lecture Theatre B)
Garfield Benjamin (University of Wolverhampton) – “Quantum Horrors: Dangerous Consciousness in the Work of Greg Egan and Charles Stross”
Tania Hershman (Bath Spa University) – “Particle Physics and Particle Fiction”
Panel 17 – Botany and Horticulture (Lecture Theatre H)
Carina Lidström (University of Örebro) – “Grasping the Nature of Nature: The Use of Literary Modes in the Linnean tradition”
Yue Zhuang (University of Exeter) – “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus (1685): Sir William Temple, China and European Vitalist Science”
Panel 18 – Sciences of the Mind (Lecture Theatre J)
Joanna Malicka (Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz) – “Embodying the Mind in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Life, End of”
Maren Scheurer (Goethe University, Frankfurt) – “Magicians and Mechanics of Souls: Psychoanalysis as Beleaguered Science in Contemporary Literature”
Panel 19 – Biology, Heredity, and the Novel (Lecture Theatre M)
Allegra Hartley (University of Huddersfield) – “Beyond Man: Evolution and Progeneracy in H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man”
Niall Sreenan (University College London) – “The Blinding Spray of Darkness: Perception, Sensation, and Affectivity in the work of Émile Zola and Jakob Von Uexküll”
Lunch and Teaching Workshop: 12.00-13.30
Panel Session Six: 13.30-15.00
Panel 20 – Light Pollution and Green Technologies (Lecture Theatre B)
Folkert Degenring (University of Kassel) – “‘On Behalf of Darkness’: Functionalizations of Light Pollution in Literature”
Greg Lynall (University of Liverpool) – “The Freedom of the Solar Cell: Technologies of the Sun across the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries”
Elizabeth Robertson (Queen Mary, University of London) – “Dead Batteries: Scientific and Technological Failure in the Work of Stephen Poliakoff”
Panel 21 – Ingestion and Intoxication (Lecture Theatre H)
Kate Gazzard (University of Reading) – “The Surgeon as Detective: Dickens, Detection and the Toxicologist”
Neil MacFarlane (Independent Scholar) – “The ‘Indescribable Lightness’ of Steerforth: Nutritive-Bodily Allusions to Shelley in David Copperfield”
Paul Vlitos (University of Surrey) – “‘Ill-Adjusted Units’: H.G. Wells and Autointoxication Theory”
Panel 22 – The Science of Poetry (Lecture Theatre J)
Catherine Charlwood (University of Warwick) – “Culture and Cognition: Expectancy Patterns within Verse”
Laurel Kornhiser (Quincy College) – “Bishop, Neruda, Darwin, and Dasein”
Wenchi Li (University of Edinburgh) – “Poems on the World of Ideas: Botanic, Astrological and Physical Imagery in Yang Mu’s Works”
Panel 23 – Science and the Supernatural (Lecture Theatre M)
Eleanor Dobson (University of Birmingham) – “‘The Most Magical of Mirrors’: Oscar Wilde and the Spirit Photograph”
Helena Ifill (University of Sheffield) – “Defining Science, Pseudoscience and the Supernatural in Popular Fiction: The Case of Mesmerism”
George N. Vlahakis (Hellenic Open University) – “Mesmerism in Nineteenth-Century Greek Literature”
Coffee and Tea: 15.00-15.30
Panel Session Seven: 15.30-16.30
Panel 24 – Literary Theory and the Science of Criticism (Lecture Theatre B)
Robert Daly (University of Oxford) – “‘Not Regular Evolution but a Leap’: Russian Formalism and Evolutionary Biology”
Michael Wainwright (Royal Holloway, University of London) – “Deadlock as Creative Impulse in Mark Twain’s ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’ and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
Panel 25 – Representing Animals (Lecture Theatre H)
Emily Alder (Edinburgh Napier University) – “Here be Monsters: (Re)Encountering Animals in Edwardian Popular Fiction”
Candice Allmark-Kent (University of Exeter) – “Nature Fakers: Animal Psychology and the ‘Realistic’ Wild Animal Story”
Panel 26 – Victorian Sexual Science (Lecture Theatre J)
Sarah Bull (Simon Fraser University) – “Cross Reading, Cross Influence, and the Traffic in Sexual Science through the Nineteenth-Century Pornography Trade”
Royce Mahawatte (University of the Arts London) – “The Literary Effects of R. J. Culverwell’s Sexological Writing”
Panel 27 – Geological Forms (Lecture Theatre M)
Adelene Buckland (King’s College London) – “Regency Science Underground: Charles Lyell, Humphry Davy, and the Things They Could Not See”
Kristen Tapson (New York University) – “‘My Lab, it’s Me’: Clark Coolidge, Scientific American”
Second Plenary Session: 16.30-17.30 (Lecture Theatre M)
Mary Orr (University of Southampton) – “Natural Science Fictions and Factions? The Remarkable Showcase of Sarah Bowdich (Lee)’s International Literatures of Science Before 1859”
12 April
Panel Session Eight: 9.00-10.30
Panel 28 – Science Enskied (Lecture Theatre B)
Cybèle Arnaud (University of Maryland) – “Stars on Stage: Laughter and Astronomy in French Comedic Theatre from 1635 to 1655”
Penny Newell (King’s College London) – “A Philosophy Forming and Tearing: Nietzsche’s Clouds”
Michael H. Whitworth (University of Oxford) – “Ether and its Metaphors”
Panel 29 – Medical Ethics and Identities (Lecture Theatre H)
Julia Boll (University of Konstanz) – “‘Only before the Cut, They Imagine We Imagined Them’: The Question of Ethics in Contemporary Literature on Science”
Chisomo Kalinga (King’s College London) – “HIV/AIDS and Narratives of Occultism in Post-Democracy Malawi and South African Literature”
Lena Wånggren (University of Edinburgh) – “An ‘Uninteresting Hybrid’: Locating the Scottish New Woman Doctor”
Panel 30 – Science and Periodicals (Lecture Theatre J)
Jennifer Cole (University of Oxford) – “Biology and Anthropology in The Crisis under the Editorship of W. E. B. Du Bois”
Rachel Crossland (King’s College London) – “‘A Review of Science and Literature’: Desmond MacCarthy’s New Quarterly, 1907-1910”
Erika Wolf (University of Bergen) – “Looking for a Language: Artists and Writers Visiting Factories in Civiltà delle macchine”
Coffee and Tea: 10.30-11.00
Third Plenary Session: 11.00-12.00 (Lecture Theatre M)
Bernard Lightman (York University, Toronto) – “Conan Doyle’s Ideal Reasoner: The Case of the Reluctant Scientific Naturalist”
Lunch and Annual General Meeting: 12.00-13.00
Trip to Down House: 13.00-18.30
