Event 6, New York, and Website difficulties
May 25, 2011 in Uncategorized by Sharon Ruston
Dear blog,
It’s been a while since I wrote and in that time the LitSciMed social space was hacked and deleted! Luckily there was a back-up site but Cristina da Costa has still been working hard behind the scenes to get everything back online. It seems to be now but let us know if there are still problems.
I’ve been working this morning on organising event 6 to be held at Leicester and Keele. I’m really looking forward to it, not least because it’s the final event in the entire programme, which began in January 2009 (though I started working on it in September 2008). It’s sad that the programme will end but we want to go out with a bang! The programme is online at http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event6_programme and applications need to be submitted by the 1st of June. There are still places available!
It’s been a while since I wrote. I was just going off to the states in my last post; I had a great holiday in Washington and New York with the added bonus of two mornings spent in beautiful archives reading Davy letters. I went to the Pierpont Morgan library (http://www.themorgan.org/home.asp) and the Pforzheimer Collection of the New York Public Library (http://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman/pforzheimer-collection-shelley-and-his-circle). The New York Public Library is without a doubt the most gorgeous library I’ve ever worked in and the Pforzheimer Collection was very exciting since it holds a great deal of Shelley circle material. There I looked at the publisher Joseph Johnson’s letter book where he recorded the letters he’d received. It noted the price he’d agreed to pay Davy for publishing his Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide in 1800.
Recently I’ve been working on my book, now provisionally titled Creating Romanticism: the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s. I’m working on the William Godwin chapter and yesterday discovered further evidence that it was Godwin who translated the French commissioners report into animal magnetism (published by Johnson in 1785). The English Review, a journal Godwin reviews for in 1785, carried not only a positive review of the translated report in 1785 (along with reviews of Godwin’s early novels Imogen and Italian Letters) but also in 1784 a very lengthy review of the original texts that were translated. These reviews even at a first glance contain many of the same passages and phrases that are used in the 1785 translation, making me think that this review shows the work that Godwin was doing for the translation (ie he wrote both). It’s very exciting stuff and I’m pleased to get back to doing some research.
Finally, if you would like to see my inaugural there’s a film of it here: http://blip.tv/litscimed/professor-sharon-ruston-5168147. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
All best,
Sharon
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