Dear blog readers, This is my first post and I’m unsure how to proceed. I’m going to use the blog as a record of relevant experiences, reading, and thoughts during the period of the AHRC-funded Collaborative Training Programme ‘Theories and Methods: Literature, Science and Medicine’. I hope it’s interesting and welcome your thoughts and comments as our programme develops. I thought I’d start with a notice – I’m sure many of you know about these already but yesterday was my first visit to the University of Nottingham’s Institute of Science and Society: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/iss/. It was hugely interesting, meeting people who work on a range of things, from the research methods of biomedicine and homeopathy to ‘biologising’ the human, from the gothic inheritance of detective fiction to medical ethics. My visit really brought home to me the variety of work being done and how much is out there that I don’t know about. I wondered how we might build bridges between the pockets of work being done that are separated by disciplinary boundaries. On their website, the Institute of Science at Society at Nottingham tells us that they are ‘Uniting the Social Sciences, Humanities and Natural Sciences’ and here are just a few of the areas they broach: •What do new discoveries mean for human dignity and social welfare? •How can scientists and the public better understand each other? •How do innovations move from the laboratory into practice and policy? •How can science best be governed?