Dear blog,
Well, it’s hard to believe that two weeks ago was the end of our week in St Deiniol’s and that a week ago we held the Literature, Culture and Science research cluster symposium. I have still only had 13 of the 20 evaluations for the St Deiniol’s event so please do fill out the online evaluation form (the link is in my previous blog post) as soon as possible. I also haven’t seen everyone’s reflective diaries and we need this from all participants so do send them in to me please.
One reason that I need the evaluations is because we’re now deep in our plans for event 2. The deadline for applications is coming up fast on 1st February. I can reveal that we’ve already received 14 applications for only 20 places. We’re intending to add to the programme over the coming days, partly in response to some of the things said in students’ evaluations of the first event. While this will be quite a different thing — we won’t all be staying in the same amazing house for example — I’m making every effort to ensure that there is time for student discussions. I’m hope that all student participants will come to dinner together at a local restaurant on day 1 and day 2 for example. More on this soon, but keep an eye out on the programme http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event2_programme to see how this changes.
I’m also hoping to book rooms for students who live more than an hour away from the venues involved (King’s College, London, the Wellcome Library, and the Royal College of Surgeons) in the same hotel. Whether we’re able to do this though will depend partly on how many students need this accommodation so I can’t say that this will happen for certain yet. We have got a brilliant programme lined up though, with some great speakers, and interesting topics for discussion, and I’m sure it will be lots of fun. There will be student presentations again, though this time they will be tied to something (whether its a text, picture, film, object, etc etc) that has caught your attention over the three day event. Again, responding to comments in the evaluations I shall make sure to create a list of student participants, their institutional affiliation and topic of their PhD thesis, so that everyone knows who everyone else is.
The symposium at the University of Salford went brilliantly last Friday I thought. We had a massively diverse range of papers, all of which showcased the interesting work going on within the deliberately loose title of ‘Literature, Culture and Science’. We heard from Kate Adams on experiential theatrical performance, Peter Buse on how it has changed his understanding of Polaroid to take pictures himself, Susan Oliver on the way that medical debates about using vaccinations were played out in the periodicals of America, and many others. In fact we were able to film many of the presentations and I’m hoping to upload these onto this social space so that people can hear them too.
Finally, it’s been a good week for the Collected Letters of Humphry Davy and his Circle week, after we heard that we’ve been awarded £5000 from the Wellcome Trust and £1000 from the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry to begin the copytyping of the letters we have in typescript and visiting archives to transcribe more letters. We’re waiting to hear about other grant applications but this is a good start, and means we can start moving on this project. The first stage is to produce a Calendar of Letters which will be published on the Royal Institution’s website and only then will be sure of the full extent of the whole project. I still can’t believe well over half of the 900+ letters we now know about have never been published and I hope that this fact is sufficient to persuade funders to invest in our efforts!
Sharon