Literature, Culture and Science
Events
- Saturday 24th October 2009: Carson Bergstrom, Gill James and Sharon Ruston will be teaching a session at the Salford Museum and Art Gallery for the Manchester Science Festival, ‘Poetry and the Planets’.
- Wednesday 25 November 2009, 3-5pm, seminar: Professor Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow), ‘Conversation in the Knowledge Economy: Science, Literature and early Victorian Etiquette’ (all welcome)
- Friday 4 December 2009, one-day conference: ‘Thomas de Quincey, Manchester and Medicine, 1785–1859’ to be held at the University of Salford, sponsored by the British Association for Romantic Studies and the British Society for Literature and Science.
- Friday 15 January 2010, one day symposium: speakers to include Dr Laurence Coupe (MMU) and Professor Clare Brant (KCL). (sign-up only, for more information, contact s.ruston@salford.ac.uk)
- 4-8 January 2010: Theories and Methods: Literature, Science, and Medicine. This five-day residential event, to be held at St Deinol’s Library in Hawarden, will introduce doctoral students to the issues involved in interdisciplinary study through a mixture of lectures, workshops and independent study. The final day will be spent visiting the Museum of Science and Industry and the John Rylands special collections in Manchester. Teaching team to include: Sharon Ruston (Salford), David Amigoni (Keele), Gowan Dawson (Leicester), Stephanie Snow (Manchester), John Hodgson (JRUL), James Peters (JRUL), Pauline Webb (MOSI). See www.litscimed.org.uk to apply for a place at this event.
About this Cluster
The Literature, Culture and Science research cluster was created in 2009, and is headed up by Professor Sharon Ruston. Each academic year, the Literature, Culture and Science cluster will hold a one-day symposium presenting the work-in-progress of its members. The cluster has six main strands, some of which overlap with the work of other research clusters in the Centre for Literary Studies. We are interested in:
- the intersections between the literature and science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Allan, Armitt, Bergstrom, Cooper, Ruston, Oliver);
- literature and medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: particularly, monstrosity, the gothic, and psychoanalysis (Allan, Armitt, Brewster);
- the history and use of technology in twentieth- and twenty-first century theatre and film (Adams, Buse);
- science fiction and fantasy, in critical and creative practice (Armitt, James);
- environmentalism and eco-criticism (Adams, Armitt, Kendall, Oliver, Ruston, Thurston);
- the interactive text in creative practice: prose, poetry, and performance (Adams, James, Kendall, Thurston)
Projects
Recent awards include AHRC-funded research leave for Peter Buse’s cultural history of Polaroid photography (2007-08); an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award (with the Royal Institution) for a PhD student to work on the chemist Humphry Davy’s poetry, which commenced in 2009; and Susan Oliver’s library fellowship to the American Philosophical Society, to study reviews and advertisements of medical texts in Philadelphia periodicals and newspapers during the period 1790–1830 (2009). Professor Jan Golinski (University of New Hampshire) was a Visiting Campus Fellowship at the University of Salford in the summer of 2009. Sharon Ruston was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant for a project titled ‘Vital Romanticism: Literature, Science and Medicine in the Romantic Period’ in 2009. Also in 2009, the British Society for Literature and Science have awarded funds to support the ‘Thomas de Quincey, Manchester and Medicine, 1785–1859’ conference to be held in December.
AHRC Doctoral Training Programme
From 2009 to 2011 the University of Salford will also lead a new AHRC-funded doctoral training programme to teach PhD students, ‘Theories and Methods: Literature, Science, and Medicine’ ( see www.litscimed.org.uk). We will deliver this training in collaboration with eleven other partners: the Universities of Keele, Leicester, Manchester, King’s College London and the London Consortium, and the Science Museum, National Maritime Museum, Museum of Science and Industry, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the Wellcome Library. Over the next two years each partner will host one event and there will be twenty places for PhD students in this field to pursue this training. After funding has finished, the website created and hosted by the University of Salford will continue to offer training resources in this subject. The University will also host one of the events, ‘Poetry and Science’, in January 2011.
Key Publications
Adams, Kate, I Found this Dirt under my Fingernails Live Art at Emergency (The Green Room, Manchester, 2 October 2009): a performance exploring the tension between the everyday passage of time and a heightened sense of being in space and time.
Allan, Janice, ‘“Conversing with Monstrosities”: evolutionary theory and contemporary responses to the novels of Wilkie Collins’ in M. Llewellyn and D. Birch (eds), Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Palgrave, 2010).
——, ‘Mrs Robinson v. Dr. Lane: a case “doubly interesting to the medical profession”’ in Mangham and Depledge (eds), The Female Body in Medicine and Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2010).
——, and Melissa Adey, Social Collaboration: Joining Forces on the Digital Frontier (view publication)
——, The Threshold of the real: A Site for Participatory Resistance in Blast Theory's Uncle Roy All Around You (2006) Body, Space & Technology Journal (view publication)
Armitt, Lucie, Fantasy Fiction (New York: Continuum, 2005).
——, ‘Photographing the gh(o)(a)stly image of undercover femininity’ in Scott Brewster et al (eds.), Inhuman Reflections (MUO, 2000), 138–49.
Bergstrom, Carson, The Rise of New-Science Epistemological, Linguistic, and Ethical Ideals and the Lyric Genre in the Eighteenth Century (Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).
Brewster, Scott, ‘Alien Induction: Hypnosis, Writing, Authority.’ Inhuman Reflections: Thinking the Limits of the Human. Eds. Brewster, Joughin, Owen and Walker. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000: 120-137.
——, ‘Psychoanalysis.’ The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 13: 2003. Ed. Martin McQuillan. Oxford/ English Association: Oxford University Press, 2005: 81-97.
Buse, Peter, 'Polaroid after digital: Technology, cultural form, and the social practices of snapshot photography', Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (forthcoming)
——, ‘Technology and Spectrality: Photography criticism and the spectral consensus’ in M. Barbeito, ed. The Order of Ghosts: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (2009),
——, ‘Surely Fades Away: Polaroid Photography and the Contradictions of Cultural Value’, Photographies 1:2 (2008).
——, ‘Photography Degree Zero: Cultural history of the Polaroid Image’, new formations 62 (2007), 29-44.
James, Gill, The Prophecy (London: The Red Telephone, 2009).
——, Scum Bag (Cambridge: Butterfly Press, 2008).
——, The Lombardy Grotto (Cambridge: Butterfly Press, 2008).
Kendall, Judy, with digital artist Steven Earnshaw, digital interactive and animated poems: http://www.digital.salford.ac.uk/page/Digita_Poetry.
Oliver, Susan, ‘Planting the Nation’s “Waste Lands”: Walter Scott, Forestry and the Cultivation of Scotland’s Wilderness’, Literature Compass (May 2009).
Ruston, Sharon, 'Authority and Imposture: William Godwin and the Animal Magnetists', in Liberating Medicine, ed. by Tristanne Connolly and Stephen Clark (Pickering and Chatto, 2009).
——, ed., ‘Literature and Science’, Essays and Studies, 61 (2008).
——, Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Future Publications, Projects and Work-in-progress
- Kate Adams is involved with Slow Art, a collective of artists and others interested in discussing and making slow art, which asks how can we work, create and exhibit slowly, and how can we re-engage the slow self of our audiences or participants? Adams and others will be holding an event which will give artists and researchers the opportunity to share and discuss work in progress early next year.
- Lucie Amitt, planned monograph: Doubly Singular: The Relationship between Science, Art and Literature in the Work of Edward Lear and Beatrix Potter.
- Carson Bergstrom is writing an article on Lockean concept of the imagination and Thompson’s poetry of the seasons using cognitive linguistics.
- With a small grant from the Institute for Social, Policy and Cultural Research, Peter Buse has been testing the properties of some of the last remaining stock of Polaroid 600 film, with due care and attention to such issues as light, climactic conditions, depth of focus, colour palette.
- Gill James has launched her book, which has a Science Fiction background, Babel. James is editing the second part, has started the third volume, and has posted a webblog which bridges volumes two and three. When Babel comes out in September 2010, James will be taking down the Rozia Blog and posting it again, having edited it, in “real time”, until Peace Child comes out in 2011. (See http://roziasglog.blogspot.com/ and http://gilljames.blogspot.com/)
- Kendall, Judy, monograph on Edward Thomas ‘Out in the dark’: Edward Thomas’s Composing Processes, dealing in part with eco-criticism (forthcoming).
- Sharon Ruston, has begun work on an edition of Collected Letters of Humphry Davy and his Circle with a team of Davy scholars including Professor Frank James (Royal Institution), Professor Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent University), Professor Jan Golinski (University of New Hampshire) and Professor David Knight (University of Durham).
Undergraduate Teaching
There are a number of modules that deal with relationships between science, medicine and literature, including Transatlantic Romanticism (levels 2 and 3) and Victorian Literature (level 2). In other modules the concerns of this research cluster are a particular focus, including: Monstrous Bodies (level two), Creating Visual Text (level 2), Green Writing (level 3), Writing the City (level 3), Gothic: Modernity and Monstrosity (MA level), Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Madmen (MA level).
Beyond the Literature, Culture and Science Research Cluster?
The research cluster intersects with a number of the wider University’s research objectives, from three of the five strategic themes identified in scoping studies (health, energy, media), to public engagement work being done in other schools, to related research in the School of Media, Music and Performance. Within and beyond our own Research Institute, there are particular interests in Science and Technology Studies (Alison Adam), in issues of public engagement (Bellaby, Ricci, Flynn), and in digital studies. Myriam Salama-Carr in the School of Languages is co-guest editing a special edition of the journal The Translator on ‘Science in Translation’ (17: 2, 2011).