Dear Blog,

First things first, there is less than a week to go before the deadline for applications for event 3. I’m very much looking forward to the next event, to be hosted by the Royal Institution and National Martime Museum, and I know that lots of effort has gone into creating an excellent looking programme. More details can be found here: http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/event3

I’ve been working in Dove Cottage http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/ since Monday and it’s been great. I’m again transcribing Humphry Davy letters; there are a few here to Coleridge and a couple of fragments, such as an account of mixtures to produce artificial cold, and an analysis of some Cobalt Ore. The letters to Coleridge are really interesting though it seems as though they were already known about since there are partial transcriptions in Griggs’s edition of Coleridge’s Letters and John Davy’s Fragmentary Remains. My one real discovery so far is that a letter had been catalogued incorrectly – I knew that it had to be 1808 rather than 1805 because in it Davy announces the death of Thomas Beddoes, his mentor at the Royal Institution in Bristol. The catalogue has been changed now but it was the incorrect date that made me think before I arrived here that there were new, unpublished Humphry Davy letters to transcribe. The affection between Davy and Coleridge is very real I think, at least on the evidence that I have read while here. Before Coleridge leaves for Malta in March 1804, Davy writes to him: ‘I shall expect the time, when your spirit bursting through the clouds of ill health will appear to all men not as an uncertain & brilliant flame; but as a fair & permanent light, fixed, though constantly in motion; as a sun which gives its fire not only to its attendant Planets; but which sends beams from all its parts into all worlds.’ In a letter written when Davy was enjoying success, on 24 November 1807, after Davy had given his second Bakerian Lecture to the Royal Society Coleridge writes the very suggestive: ‘Davy supposes that there is only one power in the world of the senses; which in particles acts as chemical attractions, in specific masses as electricity, & on matter in general, as planetary Gravitation’.

For the final two days of my visit I’ll be transcribing John Davy letter. He was Davy’s brother (1790-1868) and was also hugely successful, eventually becoming inspector-general of army hospitals, though his fame was eclipsed by his brother’s. He also lived in Ambleside so it makes sense that there’s material of his here. None of this has been published and his handwriting is easier to read than his elder brother’s!

Finally, a request from Cris de Costa, who asks that the students who have published their 500-word posts from event 2 online add a common tag to the posting, so that if becomes easier to identify those texts within the social network, something like Object_Narratives. She encourages LitSciMed bloggers always to categorise and tag all their posts with LitSciMed so that everything becomes easier to identify.

Very finally, good luck in the last days of the Wellcome Film Competition!

All best,

Sharon

Dear blog,

For those of you who don’t already know I’m stranded in Pisa. My flight was cancelled again today and now I’m booked on a new flight on Saturday. Fingers crossed… It’s very difficult to know what to do but the train will take three days (Pisa to Milan, Milan to Paris, Paris to London (or Paris to Calais then Dover then London) and then London to Manchester) and there are no available tickets online till Sunday. Of course if my Saturday flight is cancelled there will be no available train tickets till mid week next week so it was a tough decision trying to work out whether it was best to sit tight and try (again) for a flight or to start the long journey back.

One reason for deciding to stay in Pisa and go for the Saturday flight is that the University of Pisa’s English Deparment (thank you Prof Carla Dente!) have very kindly set me up with a computer and internet access. In fact I’ve been merrily working here since Saturday so that’s all good. I’ve even been able to buy English-language versions of the two books that I need to read for teaching (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the Portrait of Dorian Gray) because this is a great University town with a good English dept.

I have though missed a couple of important things now – one was the paper that I was due to give on Friday to the Council for College and University English AGM in Oxford (http://www.ccue.ac.uk/). I feel very sorry about that but it has been rearranged now for their December meeting.

As the days go by more important things will be missed, but there’s not much that I can do. It’s heartening though that the University system works to the extent that colleagues in different countries have helped me and I really am very grateful for that.

All best,

Sharon

Dear blog,

I’m so pleased to see so many blog postings already with people’s object descriptions up, and they are fascinating. The text-based description (rather than on-the-spot oral presentation) has really allowed people to reflect a little more on the object chosen and on the ideas raised by choosing objects at all. The questions after presentations on the final day of the event last week were really very interesting but we had such a short time for them that I’m hoping these blogs can really continue the work of the event and continue to pose questions and invite discussions. Please do read the blog entries and then write comments. I’d love it if we were able to use this social space to continue to talk over the ideas raised when we met.

Yesterday we heard that myself and two colleagues (Ben Harker and John Callaghan) had been successful in securing an extended programme of AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Awards, working with the amazing but in much need of funding Working-Class Movement Library <http://www.wcml.org.uk/>. I’m so pleased!  This means we’ll be able to fund a PhD each year for the next three years (the first student will start in October 2010; I guess the final student won’t be finished till 2015!). The Library has a brilliant collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century journals in its (still-not-quite-catalogued) archives and the first student, who I’ll be supervising with Mike Sanders from the University of Manchester and Lynette Cawthra from the Library, will be examining the appearances of Shelley’s poetry in Chartist and other radical periodicals. It’s all very exciting. Watch out for the adverts and tell any MA students who might be interested in applying!

Another colleague, Peter Buse, was awarded a Leverhulme research grant yesterday for his work on Poloraid cameras, so last night Salford English department was celebrating with glasses of fizzy wine all round!

Have a lovely Easter break all of you,

Sharon

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

Hello blog,

I managed to get two days in the British Library last week and spent some of those reading Joanna Baillie’s letters. There’s quite an extensive correspondence between her and Lady Jane Davy, Sir Humphry’s wife and I’ve come across a couple of really interesting things: in 1816 Joanna Baillie tells Jane Davy that she showed some of Humphry’s poetry to her brother Matthew Baillie, the surgeon, and ‘My brother, who does not read much poetry, has been delighted with Sir Humphrey’s [sic] verses’. In another letter, written to Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1822/3, Baillie writes that Sir Humphry has given her a poem for a collection she was putting together to raise money for a friend but the editor of Baillie’s letters notes that if Davy did in fact give Baillie a poem for the collection it must be an anonymous one. So I ordered this collection on Friday without much hope – and there’s a Davy poem in there! It’s called ‘Life’ but it’s a recognisable version of a poem that I’ve worked on before, which Coleridge suggests revisions for in a letter dated 1800. It was a poem he clearly continued to work on throughout his life, and it was published posthumously by his brother in his 1839-40 Memoirs under the title ‘Written after recovery from a dangerous illness’ (this version dated 1807). I wonder why his brother didn’t use the version Davy published in Baillie’s collection in 1823? I wonder what the impetus is behind Davy’s revisions of this poem? Why does he keep returning to it and what authority do the various versions have? In yet another version of the poem in one of Davy’s notebooks some of Coleridge’s suggested changes have clearly been made but these lines don’t make their way into the published versions.

Yesterday gave a paper at Bishop Grosseteste University College’s research seminar, and was able to use this poem as an example to illustrate points about ‘Science and Poetry in the Romantic Era’. In the coming months I’m going to have a think about the differences between them. It’s a real discovery because we didn’t think he had published anything beyond three poems in the Annual Anthology poems and the prologue to The Honeymoon. For those of you who know Wahida Amin, you’ll know that she’s writing a PhD on Humphry Davy’s poetry, the first study to look solely at his poetry, and this just shows that there is lots out there to find!

I was in London partly to have a planning meeting for event 3 (how quickly they are coming now!) with the Royal Institution and the National Maritime Museum. It’s going to be a great event and already we have some great sessions and speakers planned.

I hope that people will sign in to listen to me interview Peter Buse about his work on polaroid on Monday 8th March (see the blog post from LitSciMed for more details). It’ll be lovely to hear from you and have a virtual seminar before event 2.

Finally, I also heard on Friday that we have been successful in another grant application for the Davy letters project, this time £7,390 from the British Academy for travel to archives where we’ve found new material and to pay for a research assistant – which will really help with the work that we need to do! I’ll be writing the job spec soon and then we’ll be advertising the post.

All best,

Sharon

Dear Blog,

The week has been dominated by thinking about what the Calendar of Letters should look like for our Davy letters project. We’re at the stage where we are building the database and have to decide some tricky things – what should the fields be for the letters, how will people want to search them, how do we ensure that all eventualities (eg letters in French, letters using symbols, letters without a certain date) are accommodated by the database created for them? We’ve had some good discussions among the consultancy group (Tim Fulford, Jan Golinksi, Frank James, and David Knight) and there are more meetings planned. We are also regularly turning up new letters by Davy, this week David Knight noticed that the Linnaean Society has some and a few weeks ago a few turned up on Ebay of all places (thanks to David Fallon for pointing them out to me). We can’t afford to buy them unfortunately but I’m going to ask whether we can transcribe them for the edition.

I have a question about how to use the social space. We have recorded a number of the sessions at the Literature, Culture, and Science symposium held at the University of Salford and were thinking of posting them on the social space so that people could see/listen to them. Before Cristina begins editing these though, I’d like to know whether thsi would be of interest, and whether there are particular sessions people would like to see. The programme for the day can be seen at http://www.espach.salford.ac.uk/cms/news/article/?id=20. If people are particularly keen to see papers on eco-criticism, medical journals in the US, experiential theatre performances, or polaroid cameras, let me know and we’ll publish them.

Cristina also wondered about the following activity for the social space: ‘why not ask students to host their own discussions? Since most students will be participating in all the face to face events… Why not ask 2 -3 of them to host a small discussion about a topic related to their dissertation? This could be done in turns. Each week a new discussion moderated by a student. Then after the face to face event, other students would take that role, etc…’ I think this is a great idea but am interested to see what others think to. Let me know – you can leave comments at the bottom of the blog or send me a message.

Right, I’m off now to the John Ryland’s library at Deansgate in Manchester to read some letters by John Aikin (brother to Anna Barbauld) to someone called James Montgomery, whom I’m yet to identify. Am hoping this will help for an article I’m writing.

Best,

Sharon

Hello blog,

It was the first week of the new semester this week with all the chaos that that entails. The madness is sometimes fun too – we (me, Iain Vaughan and Naz) gave the first seminars of the new module ‘Monstrous Bodies’. Iain gave an excellent and really thought-provoking presentation on the idea of ‘monstrous politics’. Using James Gillray’s cartoon ‘New Morality’ (which can be seen here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/GillrayNewMorality.jpg), Iain noted the various types of monster represented, including Coleridge and Southey as half-men half-asses, and a crocodile with a corset on, which Iain suspected may have been meant to be Mary Wollstonecraft. Iain’s point was that Gillray, publishing this cartoon in a conservative anti-Jacobin magazine, was saying that this was the physical representation of people’s monstrous new republican politics. We took a look at the alarmingly wide definition of ‘Monsters’ given by the surgeon William Lawrence in Rees’ Cyclopedia from 1819, which included people with a hare-lip and many other very minor disfigurements. It’s an interesting module, which I’m trying to orient in a number of ways, using both contemporary medical texts and twentieth-century theoretical texts. Let’s hope that it works!

Just a quick note to make sure that everyone knows the resources are now online for event 1 at http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/learning. Just click on the picture of Gladstone’s bust (thanks for that Paul!) and you’ll see the kinds of things that are available. You can also read the evaluations (anonymised of course) for that event there.

Yesterday I had a look at the AHRC funded network ‘Literature and Madness’ http://www.madnessandliterature.org/. They have a conference coming up, which looks very good, and on their website are featuring reviews of books that in some way reveal issues relevant to the topic. It’s called ‘revealing reads’ and there are a great range of novels reviewed from Conrad to Amis, to writers I don’t know.

Finally, I very much enjoyed the research and teaching colloquium seminar that Phoebe Moore and I took on Wednesday (with Naz and Abby present) on ‘Interdisciplinarity’. Postgrads there were working on many more subjects than literature and science (though I was very fascinated by a PhD student working on photography and biology). It was useful to think about the positives and negatives of interdisciplinary study, how possible it was in practice, what definitions of it were, and I thought (as I have done before) about how LitSciMed needs to have a rigourous methodology and approach if it is to exist as a sub- or inter-discipline. I’ve been asked to give a paper to the annual general meeting of CCUE (the Council for College and University English) in April and I have been mulling over these ideas for that too.

More on the second event soon, which is shaping up nicely.  

All best,

Sharon