The University of Reading is offering a PhD studentship to study the relationship between zoology and literature in relation to the Cole Library of Early Medicine and Zoology. The studentship covers full fees and a bursary of £2000 per year. The project will begin in October, and the deadline for applications is 29th March. For the full details, click here:
Science and the Humanities for Early Career Scholars
We will be holding a one-day interdisciplinary workshop on Friday 14th March, funded by the British Academy, to bring together scholars working in the history of science with those working on literature and science. The workshop is aimed at PhD students, postdocs, and those in the early stages of their academic careers working in History and/or Literature with an interest in science. The workshop will explore the challenges (intellectual and practical) in developing historical and literary studies of science, and ask how early career scholars can present their work most effectively. Participants will:
- compare methodologies and assumptions across disciplines, with a view to fostering more rounded and reflexive approaches to the study of science in culture in different time periods;
- hear from established scholars about developing successful research projects and presenting historical and literary studies of science to a wider audience;
- receive guidance on constructing interdisciplinary research bids; and
- benefit from the opportunity to build mutually supportive networks with other early career scholars.
Confirmed speakers include Charlotte Sleigh (Kent), Neil Messer (Winchester), Martin Willis (Westminster), Peter Bowler (Queen’s Belfast), David Stack (Reading) and John Holmes (Reading). There is no registration fee but places are limited and participants must register in advance. Early career delegates can also claim travel expenses up to £50.
Any enquiries should be directed to Professor David Stack at d.a.stack@reading.ac.uk. To download a registration form, click here: BA Early Career workshop
Children’s Literature, Literature and Neuroscience
Professor Karín Lesnik-Oberstein will be speaking at the Oxford Children’s Literature Colloquium (CLOC) on Friday February 7th at 4 pm at St Cross College in Oxford on ‘Children’s Literature, Literature and Neuroscience: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’. If you would like to come along, please e-mail the convenor of the colloquium at cara.bartels-bland@stx.ox.ac.uk.
Depsychologizing/deneurologizing modern subjectivity?
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein will be speaking at a one-day symposium at the University of Ghent on 8th January:
What does it means to become the (neuro)psychologist of one’s own life? If something is not working in our education, in our marriage, in our work and in society in general we turn to the (neuro)psy-sciences. But is the latter’s paradigm precisely not relying on feeding neuro-psychological theories into the field of research and action? Isn’t therefore psychology not always already psychologization, and is, concomitantly, neuroscience not always already neurologisation?
The plea to depsychologize and to deneurologize modern subjective is hence rapidly uttered. If you want to know something about man, don’t study the human, don’t study psychology, study psychologization, don’t study neuroscience, study neurologization… This is however, the place where the snake might bite its own tail. The defiance is hence to make sense off, to deconstruct, to transcend, to stumble over, to reformulate, to politicize, to de-academify, to decenter, to theorize, to bring back to the praxis… the paradoxes of (neuro)-psy critique.
This one-day symposium brings together psychologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers and educationalists to reflect on the centrality of the (neuro)psy slope of modern subjectivity and its consequences for critique. The closing event of the day is the book launch of Jan De Vos’s book Psychologization and the Subject of Late Modernity (Palgrave).
Aphra Behn as a scientific translator
‘No Tincture of Learning?’: Aphra Behn as (Re)Writer and Translator
Alison Martin (University of Reading; Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) recently gave a lecture at UCL on the seventeenth-century writer Aphra Behn (1640-89) as a scientific translator. Behn was one of the foremost female writers and translators in Europe of her time. Best known as the author of the short novel Oroonoko (1688), she was also an energetic translator and produced English renderings of classical and contemporary authors, not least Bernard de Fontenelle’s work on astronomy, the Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes (1686), which appeared as A Discovery of New Worlds two years later. In this lecture Alison explores how Behn styled herself as a female translator of early scientific writing, before comparing her with British women working in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who similarly contributed to the ‘feminisation’ of science and the circulation of scientific knowledge to a wider readership through their translation activities.
- Read Alison Martin’s lecture on Aphra Behn (PDF)
Rossetti, Ruskin and Science
John Holmes has recently published two short articles from his work on the Pre-Raphaelites and science:
In an essay for a special issue of the Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, I discuss how Rossetti engaged with science in his early poetry. The Pre-Raphaelites as a group often identified science as a model for their art, but Rossetti himself was doubtful about this aspect of their project and disavowed any interest in or understanding of science in his own day. Yet his early poems make surprisingly frequent and inventive use of scientific concepts. Appropriately for a painter and a poet, the scientific concepts which most intrigued Rossetti were light and sound waves. Rossetti assiduously revised his poems, often eliminating these early interests from them, but if we go back to the earliest published versions, even of such a famous poem as ‘The Blessed Damozel’, we can see that he was much more engaged with science than he admitted.
The place where the Pre-Raphaelite engagement with science found its fullest expression was in the Oxford University Museum, where Pre-Raphaelite artists including Rossetti collaborated with the scientists Henry Acland and John Phillips and the architect Benjamin Woodward to create one of the masterpieces of Victorian Gothic architecture. The Oxford Museum is both a temple to science and a site of practical scientific learning. One of the artists most actively involved in the project was John Ruskin. Ruskin was both an influence on and caught up in Pre-Raphaelitism. A portfolio of twelve designs by Ruskin for windows for the museum survives. In an essay for the Ruskin Review and Bulletin, I show how these designs, drawn in 1855 before the foundations were laid, reveal Ruskin’s role in directing the carving of two windows in particular by Woodward’s master-mason, the brilliant James O’Shea.
To read John Holmes’s articles, click below:
Scrambling with the order of my brain…
It is not often that anyone gets to sit and listen to a medical doctor, a scientific advisor to the government and two academics in the same conference, let alone on the same panel talking to one another, but that is what happened to me this week. They were there to celebrate the launch of a new, university-wide research centre called ‘The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research into the Humanities and Science’ (www.reading.ac.uk/irhs) with a public roundtable discussion held at the university, based on short talks given by each invited speaker.
Even the nam
e might put you off at first. What, you might reasonably think, does science have in common with the humanities? Then you begin to think about it and realise that the title of the event ‘Science and Storytelling’ is not so bizarre after all. Most of us know the story of Dr Frankenstein and his monster, and that was certainly a link between science and storytelling and, as the event progressed, I realised that there are plenty of ways in which we have used storytelling to explain science (many myths are rooted in science, apothecaries wrote in literary forms, science fiction is ever popular). Then I thought about our recent fascination with forensic science in our literature and on our screens: that is certainly linking science and literature.
I started to feel on more comfortable ground until I realised that the speakers had been asked not to talk just about science influencing literature, but they had also been given the
dastardly task of talking about how literature had influenced science. Surely, I thought, that is not likely? Literature is the vehicle we use to explain all sorts of things and it is the product of our imagination, whilst science is about fact and reality, so the former could not influence the latter – it would have to be the other way around. Then I learned that early practitioners in psychology and even in physical medicine would use accounts from literature to explore and diagnose diseases of the mind and body. I also found out that our understanding of many scientific phenomena has been influence by literary creations. The link is sometimes fleeting, but it is there: it does seem that storytelling can influence science.
So, I started the week with two nicely divided compartments in my brain: literature sat on one side and science sat on the other. I was quite good at science at school and so have a fondness for the subject, but even so I was happy to have them divided. By the end of the week I sit here having had that nice order scrambled up. There is now a mental channel in my mind between literature and science. That is what happens when you work or study at a university: you cannot guarantee that anything will stay the same from one week to the next. Thank goodness.
Nature’s Verse
John Holmes will be launching the paperback of his book Darwin’s Bards with a reading and discussion of poems on evolution from across the last two centuries at the Natural History Museum in London on Monday 11th November at 2.30. For more details, click here.
Two new books
Two new books have just been published by the directors of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research into the Humanities and Science. Andrew Mangham’s Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction has just been published by Cambridge University Press. John Holmes’s Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution, first published in 2009, has just been issued in paperback. To read more about these books, and how they contribute to interdisciplinary research into the humanities and science, click on the titles above.
John Holmes lectures on literature and science in Ferrara
John Holmes was invited to speak last week at the University of Ferrara in Italy on Approaches and Methods in the Study of Literature and Science. To read about the talk (in Italian!), click here: