Earlier this month I went to the conference of the new Commission on Science and Literature at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens. The Commission – or CoSciLit – is part of the Division of the History of Science and Technology (DHST) of the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST). As Chair of the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS), I had been asked to support the foundation of CoSciLit. Its aim is to provide an international forum for research into literature and science, and to demonstrate to scientists and historians of science how important literature is to thinking about what science means, now and over time. Literature is a key source for the history of science. At the same time, it is and has always been the perfect device for refracting the apparently clear light of science into a multitude of different colours, shades and wavelengths.

I was looking forward to the conference very much. It lived up to my expectations. The range of papers was tremendous. I listened to talks by literary scholars from Britain, America and France, scientists and historians of science from Greece, Germany and Austria, and the poet and physicist Iggy McGovern from Ireland. Topics included dinosaurs in American frontier fiction, eighteenth-century satires on the Royal Society, Emily Dickinson’s response to Charles Darwin, mesmerism in nineteenth-century Greece, sexology in civil war Spain, and contradictions in the physics of Jules Verne’s Around the Moon. My own talk was on evolution in modernist epic poems by Ezra Pound, David Jones and Ronald Duncan. It was fascinating to hear so many different examples of literature engaging with science, and of literary analysis shedding light on the science itself. I was especially glad to have the chance to see this from the perspectives of scientists themselves, and from so many different countries. Perhaps the biggest lesson I learnt from the conference as a whole was that science maybe international, but it is conducted in different national contexts, which shape what science is done, what discoveries are made, and how they are seen.

On the last day of the conference I was appointed along with the organizers, George Vlahakis and Kostas Tampakis, to a small committee charged with putting in place a constitution for the Commission and holding the first elections to its official executive committee next year. We’ve also been asked to start planning CoSciLit’s future, including another conference in a couple of years, and its involvement in the next of the DHST’s huge fourth-yearly congresses in Rio de Janeiro in 2017. (The last one was last year in – less excitingly, but very appropriately – Manchester.) I am looking forward very much to working with George and Kostas to help build on the foundations they have laid, and to get more literary scholars, scientists and historians from around the world involved in the rich discussions they have begun with their excellent conference.

If you’d like to find out more about the plans for CoSciLit as they develop, and more widely about work being done and conferences being held on literature and science, take a look at the websites for CoSciLit and the BSLS.

The IRHS has been invited to give a panel at the British Association of Modernist Studies conference this week at Senate House in London. We will be giving three talks on science in modernist poetry at 1.30 on Saturday 28th June. Stephen Thomson will be talking on ‘Fables of Science and Subjectivity: Paul Valéry’s Descartes’, John Holmes on ‘Teleological Evolutionism in Modernist Epic Poetry’, and Fathi Nasaif on ‘Science and Technology in Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead”’. We hope that the panel will open up new avenues for approaching the complex relationships between a range of modernist poets and poetics and different scientific theories and conceptions of science itself.

The Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies at Reading is holding its Summer Symposium this year on Medieval Meteorology, Science and Divination. The Symposium is on Wed 2nd July, 10.30-4.00,  in Palmer Building, Room 109. Speakers include:

• Dr Marilina Cesario (Queen’s University, Belfast), ‘Wind Prognostics in Anglo-Saxon England’
• Dr Stephen Johnston (Museum of History of Science, University of Oxford), ‘Whatever the Weather: Sun, Seasons and the Astrolabe’
• Dr Anne Lawrence (University of Reading), ‘The Weather, the Stars and the New Technology’
• Dr Alexandra Harris (Liverpool University), ‘Talking about the Weather’

Registration costs £10, including lunch. For more details email Anne Lawrence (a.e.mathers-lawrence@reading.ac.uk). To book your place for the Summer Symposium click here.

John Holmes’s essay ‘The challenge of evolution in Victorian poetry’ has just been published in Evolution and Victorian Culture, edited by Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon. This is the first book to take a look at the  significance of evolutionary thinking across the arts in the Victorian period, from fiction to dance, cinema to architecture. To take a look inside, and get a flavour of the book and its coverage, visit the CUP page for the book by clicking here.

Here are the details of two upcoming talks by members of the IRHS on aspects of their interdisciplinary work:

• John Holmes will be speaking on ‘“A Just Debt of Gratitude”: John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Oxford Museum’ on Thursday 22nd May at 4 p.m. at the Ruskin Research Seminar at the Ruskin Library and Research Centre, Lancaster University
• Alison Martin will be speaking on ‘Creative Forces in Nature: British Women and the Internationalisation of Romantic Science’ on Friday 23rd May at 3.45 p.m. at a conference on Revealing Lives: Women in Science 1830-2000 at the Royal Society in London

Alison Martin (German) writes:

At the start of the year, I met up with Hilary Geoghegan from Geography who told me she was running a session on earth-writing for her 1st year geographers as part of her
GV1HUM Human Geography: Practice and Principles seminar. I’ve just spent the past six years researching style in the English translations of works by the great Prussian scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who was obsessed with writing in an engaging way to make his works readable, enjoyable and (rather importantly) profitable. In this seminar we looked at reflections by Humboldt and his English contemporaries Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin on the difficulties of producing clear and vibrant prose – something we all grapple with as we write our essays, articles and books.

On Thursday evening  John Holmes will be discussing the decorative art of the nineteenth-century Irish stone-carvers James and John O’Shea at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History with the contemporary artist Sean Lynch, whose show A blow by blow account of stonecarving in Oxford inspired by the O’Sheas and their work has recently opened at Modern Art Oxford. After their talk, there will be a launch party for Lynch’s book accompanying the show. Here are the details of the event if you would like to join us:

Event: Chipping away at a block of stone carving history

Venue: Modern Art Oxford

Time: 7.00-7.45 (conversation); 7.45-8.15 (book launch)

Charge: Free

All welcome.

A quick reminder that George Levine, Emeritus Professor of English at Rutgers University, will be speaking tomorrow  (Wednesday 30th April) at 2 p.m. in the Harborne Lecture Theatre on ‘Science and Religion from Herschel to Gould’. The lecture is open to all, so please do join us for a rare opportunity to hear one of the leading scholars of literature, science and religion.