Dear blog,

Well, it’s the end of a long day but it’s been a great day. We have a great bunch of students here – really impressive – interested in all manner of things from lots of different angles and historical periods.

We’ve had our first plenary speaker, Charlotte Sleigh, from the University of Kent gave an excellent paper called ‘Empiricism and Science’  exploring the ways in which empiricism is historically contingent and looking at points of comparison between the emergence of the modern novel and the founding of the Royal Society.

Then, Mark Llewellyn from the University of Liverpool, who had been a postdoc on the AHRC-funded Gladstone Reading Project told us a little about Gladstone’s library, where we’re staying this week. We went to the library itself and saw some fascinating annotations by the great man himself and tried some terms in the ‘Glad Cat’ or catalogue of Gladstone books.

After dinner, we had the first evening of postgraduate presentations. I learned from Louise Jenkins that while instruments are now used in approximately 60% of births now their use had been treated with far more anxiety and suspicion in the C19th. She is looking at why midwifery moved from being a woman centred process to a ‘doctor knows best approach’. Aiden Flynn is looking at ‘asylum art’ in the early C20th; it is was interesting to learn that there were exhibitions of art by asylum inmates and catalogues of their work. Such events are suggestive, he argued persuasively, in the debate over links between creativity and madness as well as the aesthetic value of Modernist art.  Will Tattersdill is looking at science fiction in periodicals in the 1890s – he gave an impassioned talk about the importance of such studies, asking whether English could help science  or any other sphere outside of itself, and his contention was that English has use because it helps us to understand the metaphors we live by. Abby Bentham is considering the shift that takes place between literary representations (such as Dostoevsky’s) of psychopaths as the ‘fiendish other’ and the more modern empathy shown to popular characters such as Dexter. She is looking at the importance of psychoanalysis and psychopharmacy in this move from the moral to the medical understanding of psychopaths. Finally, last but not least, Paul Craddock talked about the ‘poetics of transplant’ using the transplantation of teeth from early C19th urchins to well-to-do ladies as an example. Defining transplant as a transaction that takes place between two bodies, Paul is going to look at the Romantic perception of self at this crucial historical moment.

All of this in one day – and on Newton’s birthday no less… More tomorrow.

Sharon