Event 7
William Abberley (Sussex)
Will Abberley is a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at the University of Sussex in the School of English. His first monograph English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850-1914 is published by Cambridge University Press and explores how evolutionary theory reshaped visions of language change in the Victorian popular imagination. He is currently completing a postdoc funded by the Leverhulme Trust which considers how Victorians imagined mimicry and deception as biological phenomena, from insect replicas to animal camouflage. He also recently organized the conference ‘Underwater Worlds: Aquatic Visions in Art Science and Literature’ at the University of Oxford.
Wahida Amin
Wahida Amin is the Research Manager for a global project at the British Council on English language learning, which aims to help inform national education policy development. She is responsible for the collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from five continents, drawing on the knowledge and skills gained from her PhD in poetry and science that focused on the manuscript poetry and science of Humphry Davy. After being awarded her AHRC-funded PhD (Royal Institution and Salford), she developed a background in science and engineering education policy and outreach, working at the Royal Academy of Engineering. She is currently developing a website to share her transcripts of hundreds of Davy’s manuscripts poems. She has an MSc in History of Science and Science Communication and a BSc in Mathematics and English from the University of Manchester.
Verity Burke (Reading)
Verity Burke is a doctoral researcher at the University of Reading. Her thesis is an interdisciplinary study into the nineteenth-century comprehension of the body as scientific subject. Using the Francis Cole Library of Early Medicine and Zoology, ‘Cole’s Anatomy: Narrative Bodies in Victorian Literature, Science and Culture’ implements collections-based research to examine the understanding of taxidermy, anatomical atlases, museum specimens, and other ‘anatomies’ in the nineteenth-century. In addition to her research, Verity is also Research Assistant on the SSHRC-funded project ‘Building the Book of Nature: The Poetics of the Natural History Museum’ with primary investigators Professor John Holmes and Professor Janine Rogers. She recently organised the BSLS’s Winter Symposium, ‘Science in the Archives’, and a serialised digital exhibition ‘#ColeEx’ on twentieth-century zoological pedagogy. For more on Verity’s research, please see her Twitter account and her page on Academia.edu.
Paul Craddock
Since completing his PhD in the history of eighteenth-century transplant surgery, Paul Craddock has focused on film production in the academic context. Since his PhD, and since previous LitSciMed events, Paul has developed a successful film production practice with Smart Docs and he now works exclusively with knowledge professionals in universities, museums, and other public institutions. He has worked with organisations such as Nature, Imperial College London, the Science Museum, and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Paul is now developing a year-long programme to specifically benefit top-tier university departments to help them to use film to enrich their research, increase their profiles, and to actively attract funding.
Rebecca Crowley (Leeds Beckett)
Rebecca Crowley is in the process of writing up her PhD thesis and is intending to submit this in March 2016. Its title, ‘A Kristevan Analysis of Representations of Anorexia in Post-1978 Popular Prose Fiction by Women Writers’, reflects the scope of her research interests; that is, the thesis uses the ideas of Julia Kristeva to draw attention to critically under-discussed representations of mental health issues. Rebecca is also employed as a part-time lecturer in the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University, and teaches modules on the BA English, BA English and History, and BA English and Creative Writing programmes. Post-submission, Rebecca hopes to adapt her thesis into book form.
Nina Engelhardt (Cologne/Edinburgh)
Nina Engelhardt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, being on leave from her position as Research Fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Research Lab ‘Transformations’ at the University of Cologne, Germany. She was awarded a PhD in the field of mathematics and literature at the University of Edinburgh in 2012. Her book Modernism and Mathematics: Modernist Interrelations in Fiction is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.
Claire Furlong (Bath Spa)
Claire Furlong was recently awarded her PhD from the University of Exeter. Her doctoral thesis explores responses to modern science in early Victorian popular periodicals. She has an article on health advice in popular periodicals forthcoming in Victorian Periodicals Review, which won the 2015 Van Arsdel graduate student prize. She now teaches in the English Department at Bath Spa University.
Josie Gill (Bristol)
Lina Hakim (Kingston/V&A)
Lina Hakim is a London-based researcher, lecturer, and artist who is interested in the overlaps between the material cultures of science, technology, craft, and play. She is currently Lecturer in Visual and Material Culture at Kingston University, and has recently completed an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Victoria and Albert Museum working on the V&A Research Institute Pilot Project (2014-15). Lina has been teaching a course on ‘Science, Art, and Design’ to undergraduate STEM students at Imperial College, London, since 2013 and recently convened a course on ‘Key Concepts in History of Design’ to MA students at the Royal College of Arts. Lina holds a BA in Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut (2001), an MA in Book Arts from Camberwell College of Arts (2004), and an MRes in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the London Consortium, Birkbeck, University of London (2009), where she also completed her PhD (2013). Her doctoral project, ‘Scientific Playthings: Artefacts, Affordance, History’, looked at three nineteenth-century scientific instruments that became toys to explore the thinking that things afford at the levels of encounter, production, use, and re-appropriation.
Katherine McAlpine (National Maritime Museum)
Katherine McAlpine is Public Programmes Producer at the National Maritime Museum, responsible for adult learning linked to the temporary and permanent exhibitions. She was Public Engagement Officer for the Ships, Clocks, and Stars exhibition on eighteenth-century longitude investigations at the NMM. She has a background in public and schools engagement, and has previously worked at the Royal Institution and Natural History Museum. She has an MSc in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and a BSc in Science Communication and Policy.
Rebecca O’Neal (Queen Mary, University of London)
Rebecca O’Neal is a final year PhD student at the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London. Her research focuses on the work of Dr Thomas Willis, an English physician and anatomist in the seventeenth-century, popularly viewed as a ‘founding father’ of the modern neurosciences. Her research addresses the use of metaphor and analogy in Willis’s neurological writing and, more broadly, considers how ideas about the relationship between literature and science have informed popular uses of Willis in histories of the modern neurosciences. She recently co-organised and participated in a successful medical humanities public engagement project funded by the Wellcome Trust, called ‘The Carnival of Lost Emotions’. The event has featured at the Barbican Wonder Street Fair, Universities Week at the Natural History Museum, and the Edinburgh Fringe.
Abigail Oyston (Lancaster)
Abigail Oyston is a part-time PhD student in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her thesis examines representations of childbirth and associated deaths in a range of Victorian discourses, including medical articles, diaries, fiction, and poetry. Abigail works as an Academic Writing Mentor for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and also works in Public Engagement within Health Research. Her main research interests are medical humanities, feminism and gender studies, and Victorian writing.
Joanne Parsons (Bath Spa)
Jo Parsons is a lecturer at Falmouth University and is an associate lecturer and PhD candidate at Bath Spa University. She has recently taken over as general editor of the Wilkie Collins Journal and has co-edited a special issue of Nineteenth Century Contexts which also contained her article, ‘Eating Englishness and Causing Chaos: Food and the Body of the Fat Man in R. S. Surtees’ Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities, Handley Cross and Hillingdon Hall’. She is currently working on an edited collection on the Victorian male body. For more on Jo’s research, please see her Twitter account and her website.
Jessica Roberts (Salford)
Jessica Roberts completed her PhD on ‘Medicine and the Body in the Romantic Periodical Press’ in Autumn 2014. She has taught at Manchester and at Salford Universities and also works at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester. Her research focuses on the use of medical and scientific language in early nineteenth-century political rhetoric, particularly in the radical periodical press.
Jamie Stark (Leeds)
Jamie Stark is the University Academic Fellow in Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds. Based in the School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science, his main area of research is the history of medicine since 1850, especially infectious diseases and the relationship between medicine, the biological sciences, and associated technologies. His monograph, The Making of Modern Anthrax, was first published by Pickering and Chatto in 2013. He has also produced numerous journal articles and reviews in the history of medicine and science, and museum studies, and his research has been the subject of major features in New Scientist and the British Medical Journal. His current research examines the history of rejuvenation in modern Britain, with particular emphasis on hormone treatments, electrotherapy, diet, exercise regimes, and skincare, and he is Principal Investigator on the Wellcome Trust project ‘Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Medical Regeneration’ which brings together researchers from across the arts, humanities, and the social and biological sciences to examine the concept of regeneration as it applies to the human body. Jamie is Director of Impact for the School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science at Leeds and has been the Chair of the Outreach and Education Committee of the British Society for the History of Science since 2012. In 2014-15 he was one of fourteen participants on the AHRC/Wellcome training programme ‘New Generations in Medical Humanities’ and in October 2015 he was appointed to the AHRC Peer Review College.
Will Tattersdill (Birmingham)
Will Tattersdill is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham. His book, Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press, is shortly to be published by Cambridge University Press. He is organiser of the forthcoming 2016 conference of the British Society for Literature and Science, and currently researches the social history of the dinosaur.
Thalia Trigoni (Cambridge)
Currently a College Lecturer at St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, Thalia Trigoni holds a PhD in English from Cambridge University, awarded in August 2013. Her research interests lie in a period spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in relation to the unconscious, aesthetics, medicine, and the senses in contemporary fiction, drama, and poetry. Based on her doctoral dissertation, her forthcoming monograph, Unconscious Intelligence in Modernist Science and Fiction, 1890-1945, has three main objectives: to propose an alternative route into modernism through the examination of the idea of an ‘intelligent unconscious’; to uncover the wide variety of modernist literary writers, thinkers, and scientists who adopted this ontological outlook; and to explore how this way of thinking about the unconscious cut right through the heart of contemporary literary art, both in terms of creating and receiving literature. Her new project, ‘Intelligent Unconsciousness and Mental Disorder in Victorian Literature and Medicine’, investigates the connections of the ontology of the intelligent unconscious to contemporary representations, understandings, and treatments of cases of mental disorder.
Darren Wagner (McGill)
Darren Wagner is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, where he is affiliated with the History and Classical Studies Department and the Social Studies of Medicine Department. His training and expertise is in history of medicine, eighteenth-century British literary culture, history of sex, and reproductive biology. His recent publications include ‘Body, Mind and Spirits: The Physiology of Sexuality in the Culture of Sensibility’ in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the collection The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century, which he co-edited with Ray Stephanson. He is now working on a monograph with the working title Sexual Feeling: Sensibility and Generation in Enlightenment Britain. Topics particularly resonant in his work include literature and science, medicine and gender, museums and visualization, reproductive pathologies and social anxieties, cultures of experiment, anatomical technologies, and sexuality.
Joanna Wargen
Joanna Wargen completed her PhD ‘Subjugated Scientific Knowledges: Detecting the Victorian Female Scientist’ in 2013. The thesis examined the presence and absence of female scientists in Victorian fiction by exploring the female experience of science in fiction and in reality. Female scientists considered include Elizabeth Brown, Eleanor Ormerod, and Jane Marcet. Novels examined include Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time, Harriet Stark’s The Bacillus of Beauty, H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, and C. L. Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective. Since completing her PhD, Joanna has been working as a lecturer at Wiltshire College and plans to resume research into Harriet Stark later this year.
Joanna Wharton
Joanna Wharton is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of York’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. She is currently working on a monograph, provisionally titled Women Writers and the Material Science of Mind, 1770-1830. Her research interests include science, religion, and social reform in the Romantic Period, materiality and the transmission of knowledge, and body/mind relations in eighteenth-century literature.