Dear blog,
So it’s week one and I’m just about to go to do my first lecture of the 2011-12 academic year on ‘The Self’ as part of the Romantic Period module… This will be followed by two tutorial groups for the same module. I still get excited and nervous at the start of the academic year.
I was in Exeter at the beginning of this week for the ‘Biology and Culture’ workshop organised by Angelique Richardson. It was an interesting few days with a real variety of people present, even some actual scientists! The first plenary speaker was Anne Fausto-Stirling, a biologist who was trying to find out more about the markers for a child’s gender development. She is challenging the traditional accounts of gender development (the toys children play with, the peer groups they associate with) and instead was looking at the interplay of voice and touch in the dyad of the mother-child relationship. The second speaker was Jay Clayton, who spoke of genome time, pointing out that the past, present, and future are all held in the gene, while the is also the very real sense of a gene’s inheritance. He likened this to Sassaure’s idea of simultaneous synchronic and diachronic axes in the sign.
We had lots of time for discussion over the two days, with the participants offering five-minute talks on the current issues in literature and science studies and on their sense of its future directions. Much came out of this; I’ve been mulling some things over ever since and probably will continue to do for some time. There was a general consensus that we need to persuade the public (and perhaps some scientists) of the importance of history, to deepen and contextualise the issues discussed today.
Booking is now available for my lecture on Humphry Davy (the chemist and poet) for the Manchester Science Festival, which will be followed by a workshop led by Wahida Amin, a PhD student working on Davy’s poetry. The event will take place on Monday 24th October, 6-8pm in City Library (Deansgate) Manchester: http://www.manchestersciencefestival.com/whatson/humphry-davy
Best,
Sharon