Dear blog,

Well, the second event has happened now. It was all a bit of a daze but I shall try to put some of it down in this blog. We went to four museum exhibitions over the past three days (the Wellcome ‘Medicine Man’ gallery, the Grant Museum in UCL, the Foundling Museum, and the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons). The three days hung together quite well; there was a real emphasis on objects and their place in LitSciMed study, and a general theme of links between Literature and Medicine.

The first day was spent at the Wellcome Trust, on a day when a vey famous person was also there <http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2010/News/WTX059024.htm> announcing that a large amount of money would be spent on medical research. We began with a great talk by Ross MacFarlane which introduced us to Henry Wellcome and his collections and started folk thinking about collections and artefacts and the role of museums. The centrality of the Wellcome History of Medicine collection to many of the twenty-two PhD students involved in this event was clear and the rest of our day alerted students to even more books, ephemera, archives, films and online resources that would be useful to their research. I’ll try to add some links to such resources, and I’m going to create a discussion around the films that were entered in the ‘History of Medicine in Motion’ competition. Carole Reeves in her session opened a competition for all LitSciMeders (whether present at the event itself or not) to enter a film competition specifically for them. The deadline is 1st June and students (either individually or in groups) should enter films of 3-4 minutes in length. There are two (apparently very good!) prizes available for the winning entries.

The morning of day two was spent at King’s College London, with a session from Neil Vickers on retrospective diagnosis and then a session given by Brian Hurwitz on the genre of case studies. Both sessions elicited some strong responses from students and made for good discussions in the bar of the Royal College of Surgeons that evening. I’m hoping to get powerpoint slides and handouts from all speakers who used them for the resources page that we will now create for event 2.

The final day was probably my favourite though. We had a really great tour of the John Hunter collection at the Royal College of Surgeons from Simon Chaplin, where I learned lots that was new despite having done quite a bit of research on the man in the past. I also enjoyed the seminar time and finally I enjoyed hearing the students’ presentations. They had been asked to present for a maximum of three minutes on an object that had caught their attention over the past few days and which seemed relevant to their research. The results were hugely different in both the kinds of objects used and the way they were discussed. In this event again, the mix of disciplines (this time we also had a bio-archaeologist too!) made for such interesting questions, debates and perspectives.

I’ve had a thoroughly interesting few days, have had my eyes opened on various topics, some of which were new and some I thought I knew lots about. Keep watching this social space for more information about the sessions and what we learned as well as students’ descriptions of the object that attracted their interest and their responses to the event itself.

All best, 

Sharon

Dear Blog,

I’m really very excited now about the second event in the LitSciMed programme, which takes place between 25 and 27 March (ie next week!) at the Wellcome Library, King’s College London, and the Royal College of Surgeons. We have 22 people on this coming event, 9 of whom didn’t come to event 1. We have a target of getting 10 students to attend the whole programme so I’m still hoping we’ll make that but it’s great to meet new people too. There’s a real range of interest in the research these students are doing, from early modern to contemporary literature, madness to brain injury, and transplant to genetics. I am hoping that the social space will be used to allow those who aren’t attending in person to participate and to begin pre-event discussions, such as the ‘Using objects in text-based research’ which we’ve already had. Students will be asked to complete a final task for this event and these will be posted online for others to see.

I’ve been to Hull twice in the past week, which is unusual given that I probably haven’t been there for more than 15 years before this week. I went to see the hugely impressive Hull History Centre <http://www.hullhistorycentre.org.uk/> with some of the library and archive staff from the University of Salford. It really is quite an achievement – funded by a Heritage Lottery Grant, it brings together the archives of the city and the university, and event though they’ve only be opened 6 or 7 weeks, they’ve already had 10,000 visitors through the door!

One Wednesday I went to Hull University to speak about the successes I’ve had with AHRC schemes such as the Collaborative Doctoral Award and the Collaborative Research Training scheme. It was very nice to meet people and to talk to someone who currently holds a CDA with the National Maritime Museum.

Finally, a piece of nice news. I’ve been nominated to be a Fellow of English Association (http://www.le.ac.uk/engassoc/), which is a real honour and I was very pleased to accept the nomination. 

More soon, probably after our next event…

Sharon

Dear blog,

I’ve just been shown the database that letters will be typed into for the Calendar of Davy letters that we’re planning. It’s a great piece of work by a University of Salford spin-off company <http://www.edinteractive.co.uk/> who also did the litscimed website for us. The database  is being finesssed to make sure that it’s as easy as possible for the copytypist to use, and was greatly aided by the lists of places and publications that Naz Amin drew up for us from the letters we have currently. The project continues apace and it’s great to be thinking of the next stages — visiting archives and transcribing newly found letters — knowing that the data we have is being captured ready for our use.

I was in Cyprus last week as part of a staff mobility Erasmus exchange. I gave a lecture on James Hogg’s Confessions to third-year students, a research paper to staff and students, and a seminar on Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ to first-year poetry students. It was really great fun, lovely to be away from the cold north of England, and a really interesting experience. The seminar, for example, was much larger – to 35 students – and it was a real task to keep everyone engaged on the task at hand, but thoroughly enjoyable. Staff at the University of Cyprus were wonderful, particularly Stella and Evy, and were brilliant hosts.

I’m sad that no-one was interested in the planned interview with Dr Peter Buse on his research into Polaroid (sorry, Josie, you were the only person who even tried to log in to the session). We cancelled it when it became clear that there was no point going ahead. I’m open to suggestions for how to use the social space and encourage more activity on it – please do let me know what we can do.

I’m going to visit the Hull History Centre tomorrow <http://www.hullhistorycentre.org.uk/> to see what can be done with archives in the hope that one day we might be able to do something like this with our archives at Salford.

All best,

Sharon