Dear blog,

This has been an eventful week. On Monday I did my last stint as external examiner to the Literature and Medicine MA at King’s College, London. I’ve been an external for the MA since it began and this was my fourth and final year. It’s an excellent MA with some really great modules that I would have loved to have taken myself and I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone thinking of taking this kind of course: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/english/pg/masters/litmed.html. Of course King’s has also secured Welcome money to set up a Medical Humanities centre, which is very exciting too.

Tonight I will be attending ‘Wonder: A Scientific Oratorio’  in Maxwell Hall at the University of Salford. The music will come from the BBC Philharmonic, BBC Singers, Salford Choral Society, accompanied by visual images from Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre and the BBC, to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, 40 years since the moon landings and 200 years since of the death of the great composer Haydn: http://www.arts.salford.ac.uk/more_info.php?id=81.

It’s only a week to go till the Thomas de Quincey, Manchester, and Medicine, 1785-1859 conference that I have organised for Friday 4th December. All seems to be in hand (hopefully) and the programme looks great. After the day’s event we will be going on an organised walk with Emma Fox as our tour guide, exploring some of the places associated with de Quincey and early nineteenth-century science in Manchester: http://www.iscpr.salford.ac.uk/iscpr/news/article/?id=41

More next week,

Sharon

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?