2022
Patrick Armstrong, for attendance at the British Society For Victorian Studies Conference 2022, at the University of Birmingham, 1-3 September 2022
Through generous funding from the BSLS, I was able to attend the British Association of Victorian Studies 2022 Conference, where I was fortunate enough to present a paper entitled ‘Radical Optics: Microscopy in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy’, which draws on material from my recently completed doctoral dissertation (‘Microscopy and Modernist Fiction from Hardy to Beckett’). In my paper, I argued that Hardy and Eliot stand out as the two foremost nineteenth-century novelists who made imaginative use of the microscope in their prose fiction. My talk included a comparison between Hardy’s and Eliot’s two chief microscopists and surgeons operating in small communities: Dr. Edred Fitzpiers of The Woodlanders (1887) and Dr. Tertius Lydgate of Middlemarch (1871-72). Examining these two figures allows us both to consider the ways in which Hardy and Eliot figured the microscopist and to reveal the structures of feeling related to the microscope in the second half of the nineteenth century. I suggest that in many works of prose fiction by Hardy and Eliot the external world is represented and intensified through both telescopic and microscopic lenses, which generate new modes of feeling, shifting imaginative relations between subject and object, microorganism and macroorganism.
As is often the case at large conferences like BAVS, it was impossible to attend all of the panels that interested me; however, I was able to listen to a wide range of papers over the three days. I attended fascinating, and often truly interdisciplinary, panels on Victorian architectures, Thomas Hardy, the sea in nineteenth-century literature, and bodily ethics (to name but a few). The whole conference was a very enjoyable experience. It was inspiring to hear more about the excellent research that is being carried out across various disciplines in Victorian Studies; I left the conference with plenty of ideas and many new literary and critical works to read and think about. This is particularly helpful and well-timed because I am currently in the process of devising a new research project, as well as attempting to develop my doctoral dissertation into a book. I would like to thank the BSLS once again for their generous support, without which I would not have been able to attend and speak at this memorable event. I would also like to take this opportunity to extend my gratitude to the very helpful and friendly conference organisers.
Rosalind Crocker, for attendance at ‘The Past as Nightmare’ Conference, University of Reading (UK), 6-7 September 2022
I was fortunate to be supported by the BSLS, as well as my doctoral funding body WRoCAH (White Rose College of Arts and Humanities), to attend the ‘Past as Nightmare’ conference held at the University of Reading. Looking at conceptions and complications of ‘the past’ in the Gothic tradition, the conference saw a wide range of interdisciplinary responses to this theme across time periods and media, and my own paper sat alongside a number of others which considered literature and science. Over the course of the two days, I attended panels relating to: nightmares and hallucinations; locality and history; film and television; and my own panel, which related to the Gothic researcher.
My paper, ‘“Literary critics make natural detectives”: The Researcher in Neo-Victorian Gothic’, looked at a number of permutations of the Gothic researcher, including the biographer, the academic, and the medical scientist. I argued that the researcher acts dually in the neo-Victorian mode, both as a metafictional arbitrator of narrative, who relays information to the reader, and as a driving force of the plot, exposing the narrative’s central mysteries through their research. This paper was derived from an overarching theme in my thesis, which considers the ‘medical man’ in neo-Victorian fiction. In terms of medical research in particular, the role of the researcher in explaining and relaying scientific knowledge to a non-expert readership is even more pronounced, and this is a key aspect of one of the texts I considered in my paper: The Blood Doctor by Barbara Vine.
During the conference, I was struck by the varied interpretations of the conference theme, particularly in Ailise Bulfin’s keynote, which considered the Gothic resonances of nineteenth-century invasion and catastrophe fiction. As Dr Bulfin argued, these fictions, which in different ways threaten a return to an imagined, nightmarish past, express an ambivalence around modernity, provoking an anxiety about the precarity of progress. This is certainly an idea which I will be keeping in mind in my own work around fin-de-siècle fiction. As well as thought-provoking panels, the conference also provided many opportunities to get to know other participants. I enjoyed being able to do this in person, and, through live-tweeting the event, I was also able to start conversations with others online who were interested in the conference. Overall, the conference was a really exciting and productive way to share and hear research, and I’m very grateful to the organisers at the University of Reading, WRoCAH, and the BSLS for allowing me the opportunity to attend.
2021
Jade Hinchliffe, The University of Hull, for attendance at the Science Fiction Research Association Conference 2021, “The Future of/as Inequality”,
Seneca College Toronto, Canada, 18-21 June 2021
The BSLS generously funded my membership and registration fees for the Science Fiction Research Association Conference 2021. I presented a paper entitled “Sorting Bodies, Sorting Trash: An Analysis of Posthuman Capital in Chen Quifan’s Waste Tide”. Waste Tide is a Chinese dystopian novel and it was first published in China in 2013 to great success. Head of Zeus published Ken Liu’s English translation of Waste Tide in 2019. In my paper, I discussed the ways in which the migrant workers at the e-waste recycling factories in Waste Tide were equated with, and treated like, the trash they sort. I provided an overview of Chen’s comments regarding their visit to the e-waste recycling centres in Guiyu, Guangdong Province, China and how this experience led Chen to write their first novel. In the novel, the migrant workers are labelled ‘waste people’ by the locals, and they live, work, and die in a toxic, polluted environment. I read the novel through the lenses of posthuman capital and waste studies. In their monograph Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels (2019), Justin Omar Johnston states that the ‘directive to become “more human” is a call to appreciate one’s human capital or to upgrade one’s body through various biotechnical self-investments. Critically, however, if one can always become “more human,” then one can never, finally, become human enough or fully human’ (2). In the novel, the ‘waste people’ are physically scarred by the pollution and, at the same time, richer citizens have prosthetics to upgrade their capabilities. There are many instances in the novel where the ‘waste people’ are treated as sub-human and are viewed as trash by the locals. In their monograph, Waste Matters: Urban Margins in Contemporary Literature (2017), Sarah K. Harrison states that literary criticism in the field of waste studies shows how ‘waste is figured as both a physical problem and unwelcome social status’ (5); Harrison defines urban waste as ‘things, places and people that have commonly been discarded’ (6). In Waste Tide, the migrant workers are the people who have been discarded. My conference paper originates from a thesis chapter, which evaluates social class and climate change in contemporary dystopian novels. I chose to discuss this aspect of my PhD research at the SFRA conference because it fit in well with the conference theme.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching the papers at the SFRA international conference. There were papers on American SF, British SF, Chinese SF, Latinx SF, Spanish SF, South Korean SF, Turkish SF, and more, which showcases the diversity of global SF today. As my thesis examines global dystopian fiction, it was very useful to hear from other researchers working on global SF. I found the PhD/ECR professional development workshop on finding a job in SF particularly helpful and the session felt much more interactive and informal. I thought that the SFRA conference was very engaging. I made new connections and felt a sense of solidarity and community—particularly during the professional development workshop—which is very difficult to achieve in an online format. Thank you to the BSLS for providing financial support to enable me to present at and attend the SFRA conference.
2018
Annie Webster, SOAS, for attendance at the ‘Frankenstein @200 Health Humanities Conference’ at Stanford University 20-22 April 2018, for her paper entitled ‘What’s-it’s-name?: Frankenstein’s Creature and the Politics of Naming in Post-2003 Iraq’.
The 2018 International Health Humanities Consortium Conference took place at Stanford University from April 20- 22nd. This year’s conference, enticingly titled ‘Frankenstein@200’, celebrated the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by dissecting the text as a study of medically-based ethical dilemmas and exploring its relevance to the moral medical imagination today. The fertile afterlife of Shelley’s text – rich in retellings and reinterpretations – attracted scholars from around the worldworking in fields as diverse as comparative literature, clinical ethics, disability studies and anesthesiology. This spectrum of specialities generated rich cross-fertilisations in which theoretical considerations of the mythologies and metaphors manifest in the story of Frankenstein were brought into conversation with practical discussions of public policy, arts therapy and new technologies emerging in medical practice.
The extensive programme included four keynote speakers. On the first day Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University) opened the conference with a meditation on the melancholic afterlives of historic murder victims and the ways in which researchers participate in this melancholia as a mode of commemoration while Lester Friedman (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) performed an impressively intricate genealogical study of the ‘Frankenstein family tree’ in film, for which he received a standing ovation. Alvan Ikoku (Stanford University) read Shelley’s text as an exercise of ethical education via narrative exchange andCatherine Belling (Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University) concluded the plenary sessions by playfully reflecting on the ‘scarily proliferate meaning making of Frankenstein’ which might at once be conducive to healthy epiphanies while also risk inducing a state of psychotic apophony – the perception of connections between unrelated things – amongst readers.
An array of plenary panels, poster displays, flash presentations, concurrent sessions and special performances developed these themes, germinating questions around ethnic representations in the Frankenstein corpus, temporalities of death, constructions of disability in professional and personal narratives, the birthing of literary bioethics, genetic mappings of humanity, and the metaphors instrumental to medical epistemologies. My own paper ‘What’s-its-name?’: The Politics of Naming in post-2003 Iraq’ explored how the problems and politics of naming articulated in Shelley’s original Frankenstein translated – culturally and linguistically – into the ethics of recording and representing civilian casualties within Iraq in a recent remoulding of the story by Ahmed Saadawi entitled Frankishtayn fi Baghdad (2013; Frankenstein in Baghdad). This was constructively placed in dialogue with papers examining Frankenstein as a model for fractured relationships of love that exist in cases of domestic violence in Bengal by Amrapali Maitra (Stanford University) and moral explorations of Nazi medical experimentation by Robert Allinson (Soka University of America) and Lilia Popova (Stanford University).
Alongside academic papers there was an impressive choice of interactive ‘breakout’ sessions in which partipants could work on pieces of creative writing, mould their own faces out of clay and attend the ‘Hippocrates Café’ to hear live musical performances relating to the Frankenstein story. I attended a breakout session titled ‘The Spark of Life in Modern Medicine:Who’s the Monster?’ delivered by David M. Gaba, the Associate Dean for Immersive and Simulation-based learning at Stanford School of Medicine who addressed the clinical issues of putting patients into various states of ‘suspended animation’ and how simulated human beings can be used when teaching medical students. As part of this session we were led into a simulated operating theatre to ‘meet’ a medical mannequin equipped with a simulated heartbeat, pulse and voice – it even blinked! This was an unsettling introduction to the beings that dwell in the ‘uncanny valley’ alongside Frankenstein’s creature.
Outside of the formal conference schedule, the event was accompanied by the exhibition ‘Betray the Secret: Humanity in theAge of “Frankenstein”’ at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Centre, which included paintings, sketches and photographs of the human body and human interactions with technology. This forms one feature of a yearlong arts festival celebrating the literary and scientific legacies of Frankenstein.
I would like to thank The British Society for Literature and Science for facilitating my attendance of this amazing event held in Stanford’s cutting-edge campus in Silicon Valley. The conference profoundly shifted my understanding not only of Frankenstein,but also medical humanities as a field. It also offered an inspiring example of a truly interdisciplinary and interactive event. The whole experience will feed into the body of my research in all kind of creative ways.
Saskia McCracken, University of Glasgow, for her paper at Transitions: Bridging the Victorian-Modernist Divide at Birmingham University on 9-10 April 2018, entitled ‘Revolution, Evolution, and the Darwinian Politics of Virginia Woolf’s “creature Dictator”’.
“Transitions: Bridging the Victorian-Modernist Divide”, the most recent conference organised by the Midlands Modernist Network, brought together a range of academics working across this divide for two exciting days of interdisciplinary dialogue. The primary focus of the conference was literature, but a range of related topics such as science and technology were also covered, including memorable presentations on Dracula and typewriters (Jessica Gray), and Joyce and science-fiction (Boyarkina Iren). The conference showcased a range of cutting-edge research on topics including Djuna Barnes and Victorian bisexuality (Hannah Roche), Joyce’s obscene confessionals (Katharine Mullin), and colonialism in Olive Schreiner’s early feminist writing (Rachel Hollander). Several other papers dealt with scientific themes, including the keynote address by John Holmes, author of Darwin’s Bards. Holmes teased out some of the evolutionary and teleological content of several modernist and late modernist epics, emphasising the extensive impact that Victorian scientists had on poets such as Ezra Pound.
I come from a Woolf studies background, and it was wonderful to see the Woolf-pack out in force, with great papers on Woolf and Protestantism (Jane de Gay), Margaret Oliphant (Anne Reus), William Wordsworth (Matthew Holliday), Leslie Stephen (Tom Breckin), George Eliot (Charlotte Fiehn), and beastly flânerie (David Barnes).
Then of course, there was Sarah Parker’s fantastic keynote on the overlooked writer and suffragist Alice Meynall, whom Woolf snidely referred to as a ‘poetess’. Parker shed light on Meynall’s life and works, and offered a more flattering portrait of her than Woolf does in her diary, where she writes that Meynell ‘had 7 children & wrote about 5 paragraphs a day for society papers & so on—all the time looking like a crucified saint’.
Thanks to the BSLS Postgraduate Conference Fund, I was able to present my paper ‘The Darwinian Politics of Virginia Woolf’s “creature Dictator’’’ at Transitions. This paper investigates the politics of Woolf’s ‘worm […] crea- ture Dictator’ in her anti-fascist feminist polemic Three Guineas (1938), and her related worm imagery, through the lens of Darwin’s writing on worms, and the social Darwinist discourse of the silk production industry in 1930s Germany. Critics including Gillian Beer have demonstrated Woolf’s extensive engagement with Darwin’s writings and analogies; building on this work, I aimed to unearth the politics of their wormanalogies, offering a reading of both writers that engages with the current animal turn in literary criticism.
This conference highlighted a range of exciting connections between writers who lived in the nineteenth and/ or twentieth centuries, and I gained valuable insight into Victorian studies scholarship, helping me to contextualise my research on Darwin’s work in relation to Modernist writing. This insight, in turn, has informed my research on Woolf and Darwin’s portrayal of material and metaphorical animals. I was delighted to contribute to this collective discussion, in alignment with the wider objectives of the BSLS: to promote interdisciplinary research into the relationships of science and literature in all periods. Transitions was an interdisciplinary success and a thoroughly enjoyable two days of all things Victorian and Modernist, and everything in between.
2017
Alice Gibson, ‘Reflecting on Nature’s Destructive Power, through Giacomo Leopardi’s Broom, or Flower of the Wilderness, at the 31st SLSA meeting in Tempe, Arizona November 2017
The theme for the 31st Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, which took place at Arizona State University in Tempe was “Out of Time”. Areas examined over the course of the four days from November 9-12 included nonhuman temporalities, species extinction, life after humans, time in relation to biopolitics, and time and capital.
On Friday, Sha Xin Wei gave the first keynote and examined what it means to consider temporality non- anthropocentrically and to let go of the conceit that we are the central and most important beings in the world. Xin Wei is the Director of the SynthesisCenter, the physical space at ASU characterised by its focus on play and the creation of responsive and non-anthropocentric environments. His talk raised and sought to address questions concerning how we might refocus our attention via experiential and enactive practices, drawing inspiration from vegetal life and playing with time-based media, and he encouraged the audience to engage with workshops hosted by the Center over the course of the conference.
McKenzie Wark, the second keynote, who spoke on Saturday, based his presentation on the British scientists, science journalists, and science fiction writers who made up the Social Relations of Science Movement, including JD Bernal, JBS Haldane and Joseph Needham. I found the focus in Wark’s talk on drawing from women such as Charlotte Haldane and Naomi Mitchison,who connected reproductive technology and the changing fortunes of women, particularly interesting and left with numerous additions to my reading list.
These keynotes were enclosed by eclectic panels and discussions, many of which dealt explicitly with the relationships of science and literature and all of which, perhaps by virtue of my own selection process, were characterised in some way with the question of how to engage with the world more intelligently, many from an overtly ecological perspective. One particularly enjoyable panel was that of the Society for the Study of Biopolitical Futures, which comprised of excellent presentations that examined the preface of Hegel’s Preface to the Philosophy of Right, in addition to Spinoza’s Ethics and the role of democracy within his thought.
The scientific engagement of the conference ultimately extended beyond the event itself, since we were invited to attend a tour of the incredible School of Earth and Space Exploration where a replica of NASA’s Curiosity rover is proudly displayed. We learned here that, since stickers with branding that may become detached from the vehicle and float off into space are prohibited on the rover, the team in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, where the rover was designed and built, got around this barrier for publicity by leaving their mark in the form of track marks imprinted by the tyres which lay down Morse code for JPL.
This close to the conference reminded me of the importance of extending our imagination beyond the earth’s surface and the challenge such reflexes pose to habitual anthropocentrism, bringing me back to the comparison of Kant and Leopardi’s that my work began with. The ecological emphasis of many of the discussions over the course of the four days prompted me to pay more attention to the role of Leopardi’s so called “cosmic pessimism”, in which I now believe a large proportion of his contemporary significance lies. All in all, the experience of attending SLSA 2017 was incredible, and couldn’t have been located in a more apt environment, in which a refreshingly varied group of academics shared, critiqued, and built upon each other’s ideas.
Kanta Dihal, University of Oxford, paper on ‘Quantum Physics as a Defamiliarizing Technique in Science Fiction’, to be delivered at the 75th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), Helsinki, August 2017.
Moritz Ingwersen, Trent University, Ontario & University of Cologne, ‘“Geological Insurrections”: The Weird Return of Rust and Dust in Two Short Stories by China Mieville’, ASLE, Detroit, June 2017.
The biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) held at Wayne State University, Detroit, in June 2017.
Over the span of 4 days and with up to 18 concurrent panels at any given time, the scholars, artists, activists, and poets who came together under the conference theme “Rust/Resistance: Works of Recovery” offered a thought-provoking Wunderkammer for anyone interested not only in the intersection between literature and science but also in a more fundamental engagement with what it means to speak about “nature,” “culture,” “technology,” “the human,” and that ubiquitous, yet elusive, notion of the “anthropocene.” With a pronounced interest in science fiction and as the presenter of a paper on the British New Weird flagship author China Miéville, I had ample opportunities to explore and widen my academic horizon. Thematically, the conference was exceptionally diverse and yet provided a strong sense of unified purpose. It might not come as a surprise that, especially in view of recent U.S. American policy shifts, issues including climate change, eco-diversity, sustainable futures, and energy cultures were addressed with a heightened sense of urgency.
While the ground covered by the keynote lectures was inspiring, leading from an insightful reconsideration of Thoreau by Laura Dassow Walls, to an evocative poetry reading by National Book Award winner Ross Gay (Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, 2014), and Kyle Powys White’s spirited talk “Resurgence from within the Rust: Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene,” I would like to give credit to some of the literature and science related highlights I encountered in the panels I was fortunate to attend. At least two panels addressed the meeting of ecological imaginaries and weird fiction: “Weird Ecology: Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy and Environmental Resistance” and “The Many- Tentacled Present: EnvironmentalHorror in Film, Literature, and Everyday Life.” In the first, Anna Wilson approached the weird imbrication of landscape and agency in VanderMeer’s fiction through the lens of an “alien- oriented ontology” and Laura Shackelford suggested a reading that combined posthumanism with a consideration of non-Euclidean geometry. In the second, Marcel O’Gorman took the aesthetics of H.P. Lovecraft as a starting point to revisit the distinction between (human) terror and (nonhuman) horror in lightof a problematization of object-oriented-ontology, Isabelle Stengers’s In Catastrophic Times, and Donna Haraway’s “Tentacular Thinking,” while, similarly, William Major elaborated on Haraway’s invocation of the “Cthulucene.” Certainly an exceptionally productive site for ecocritical reflections was found in the field of science fiction. Panels such as “Dhalgren and the Speculative City in the Post-Industrial Age,” “Resistant Discourses and Strategies of Recovery: Exploring Gender and Environment inScience Fiction,” and “Fictions of Climate Apocalypse” provided a forum for readings of Samuel Delany, J.G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, the Mad Max Franchise, Her, Ex Machina, Up- stream Color, Soylent Green, and Wall-E with the help of a conceptual toolbox that included queer criticism, the energy humanities, constructions of Edenic landscapes, spatialized subjectivities, zombie media, systems theory, and the post-industrial unconscious, to name but a few.
I left the 2017 ASLE conference with a strong sense that the relationship between human societies and the planetary ecology will continue to grow into an ever more pressing topos in interdisciplinary negotiations between the sciences and the humanities and that excit- ing trajectories will emerge especially with regard to the mobilization of environmental media studies (from Harold Innis, to Bruno Latour, and John Durham Peters), indigenous and postcolonial criticism, and the themes of oil and water.
It seems worth a note that ASLE provided a particularly conducive forum for the interaction among and appreciation of graduate and early career research. I attended a workshop entitled “Teaching Ecocriticism in the Introductory Classroom” where we not only exchanged syllabi and reflected on the challenges and didactic methodologies of facilitating environmental awareness in a variety of cross-disciplinary courses, but also were able to give each other advice on how to draft an academic CV and highlight our skills for the job market. In a meeting with the ASLE graduate student representatives, we were furthermore encouraged to actively contribute to and shape the orientation of future conferences and enrol in the ASLE mentoring program, which matches graduate students with senior members to foster professional networking in the field.
2016
Ryan Sweet, University of Exeter, Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies Conference at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Maria Avxentevskayato, Freie Universitat Berlin, Scientiae Conference in Oxford.
