Research Methods, PhD viva, and Raymond Tallis

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Dear blog,

I can report that I still have a cold and had very little voice for a couple of days this week, which made teaching quite tricky. We are now in the last throws of term. I have (a few minutes ago!) finished the four lots of marking that I had to do, but there’s still next week to go, with MA teaching on Conrad, Genette, and Brooks on top of the usual things to get through. Then, I might be able to get back to some research in the week before Christmas, something I’ve not managed to do for the past four weeks.

It’s been a tough but interesting week. On Monday a delegation from King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia arrived, to be taught Research Methods here at Salford for a fortnight. The group comprise a real range of disciplines (Veterinarians, Arid Agriculture, a Librarian, and a number of English Language academics) and range from Professor to Assistant Professor, Lecturers, and an Administrator. For the welcome dinner on Monday evening we went to Manchester United football ground at Old Trafford where we had a tour (of the changing rooms, the players’ lounge, which was surprisingly unglamorous, and had a look at the pitch). We had dinner in the Boardroom. It was good to meet the participants of the Research Methods course because the next day I was teaching the first of my two sessions, this one on archival research. I tried to make it seem relevant to those working in other disciplines than English and History. I used the Davy Letters project (http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/) as an example and took along some copies of letters for participants to transcribe. It was great fun actually and really interesting to meet colleagues from other disciplines and from another continent.

On Tuesday evening I attended Raymond Tallis’s talk, which was part of the VC’s Lecture Series here at Salford (http://staff.salford.ac.uk/news/details/2584). I like Tallis’s work, though I have some doubts too, and he’s a great speaker. He was talking about his new book, Aping Mankind, which discusses what he calls the ‘two pillars of unwisdom’: Darwinitis and Neuromania. Tallis’s scientific credentials are clear and he’s of course convinced that Darwin was right, but he thinks that biology is not sufficient to account for us as humans. We are not solely animals, he argues; we are both part of and apart from nature. It was interesting and thought-provoking and I have a degree of sympathy with his ideas.

On Wednesday I was internal examiner to a PhD thesis on a labouring-class poet of the late nineteenth-century, Alexander Anderson. Anderson was also known as ‘Surfaceman’; he was a railway man as well as a poet and is best remembered now for his children’s poem ‘Cuddle Doon’ (he was Scottish too!). I learned a great deal from the thesis and the student had done some excellent archival work, recovering his work, including finding an unpublished poem ‘The Death of Lazarus’.

I want to mention another blog, http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/scienceandculture/, which offers an account of the Science and Culture Workshop at Exeter that I attended at the start of the semester. Neurological approaches to literature were a big topic there too.

Finally, we have a doctoral studentship available for an October 2012 start and would especially welcome applications in the fields of the Gothic, women’s writing, literature and science, post-holocaust literature, modern poetry or periodicals and print culture. Details are here: http://www.salford.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/fees-and-funding/ahrc-studentships/doctoral-award-in-english. Please get in touch if you’d like to study with me.

All best,

Sharon

 

Not Work!

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Dear Blog,

I’m in bed with my second cold of the semester, but since I am also on STRIKE (http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=581) I have decided to write a blog post that isn’t about work (well, not directly at least).

Some time ago now, early in November, I went to a Close Up event in Manchester, where the DJ Dave Haslem interviewed novelist Jeffrey Eugenides. It was a wonderful event. I loved Middlesex and Eugenides’s new novel The Marriage Plot is calling out from my shelf to be read (it will have to wait until the Christmas holidays unfortunately). It sounded excellent from the reading that Eugenides gave at the event, with particular interest for English folk. Part of the plot involves a character’s struggle with the ideas in Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse in her University semiotics class.

A friend recently alerted me to a number of Frankenstein-related projects mentioned in a summer edition of Empire film magazine, which show that the ideas of the novel at least are still alive in the popular imagination. There is speculation that the SF director Shawn Levy may be planning something and if so, according to Empire, this film would join at least five other projects in various stages of planning! These include ‘Universal’s long-planned Guillermo del Toro pic […], Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein, Peter Ackroyd adaptation The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein at Ghost House Pictures, Summit’s This Dark Endeavour [and] Tim Burton’s animated Frankenweenie’ (http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=31870). The range of interest is brilliant I think.

I read today that there’s a new exhibition in Paris, curated by ex-footballer Lillian Thuram, called Human Zoo: The Invention of the Savage, which looks at the global phenomenon (only ended in 1958!) of displaying human ‘exhibits’, including the story of the famous nineteenth-century Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikoi woman from South Africa, who was displayed as the ‘Hottentot Venus: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/29/huam-zoo-paris-exhibition. The idea of this now is abhorrent; Thuram is adamant that these ‘freak shows’ explain the fear of ‘the other’ that continues to persist today.

To end with, I do hope that you are all supporting the strike action. It’s for a very important cause: public sector pensions are being dismantled before our very eyes.

Best,

Sharon

Bergen and the Manchester Science Festival

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Dear blog,

I’m deep in the midst of marking at the moment and it’s a welcome break to write this and think about something else! I went to the Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities conference last week at the University of Bergen in Norway (http://www.uib.no/fg/litt_vit/nyheter/2011/04/literature-and-chemistry). It was an interesting idea, to bring together literary scholars and chemists to talk about the relationships between literature and chemistry. Our hosts were absolutely wonderful and Bergen itself is lovely. The conference tended to focus on a few key authors, particularly Primo Levi, Goethe, and Davy had a fair few mentions too.

Though it was interdisciplinary in one sense, particularly in the mix of people who were present, it wasn’t really in other senses. While I might not have understood at all, I would have liked to have heard the chemists speaking more on their own subject rather than on literature since their lack of expertise in our subject led to papers that dealt with biographies or synopses of texts. One chemist did offer something that I certainly could not have presented myself; he went through the episodes in Levi’s The Periodic Table, where Levi systematically stole what he could from the chemistry lab in Auschwitz and tried to create sustenance from these things. Professor Luigi Dei, from the University of Florence, explained the chemical formula of these items and went through the chemical processes Levi attempted until he was successful in making cigarette lighters with the elements he had stolen and sold these for food. Other great papers came from the literature scholars – Robert Gordon from Cambridge (again on Levi), Folkert Degenring from the University of Kassel on science fiction, George Rousseau from Oxford on Ludwig Boltzman, and Dominic Rainsford from the University of Arhus on Wordsworth. The latter paper was incredibly suggestive I thought. Dominic used the chemical process used to produce a precipitate to argue that in many of the situations Wordsworth explores in the Lyrical Ballads, the poet places himself as a ‘sensitive and unstable mixture’ in a unstable context and a reaction occurs, which leaves the reader with some kind of product (the precipitate), in the form of, perhaps, a changed view of the world.

I can report too that the event for the Manchester Science Festival on 24th October went well. We had 41 attendees in the end. I gave the lecture part of it and then Wahida Amin, a Phd student working on Davy’s poetry, gave out a selection of poems to participants in groups and they discussed them. It was a fun evening and it was good to be able to show people poems that are not particularly easy to access or in the public domain.

Now back to this marking…

Sharon

Manchester Literature Festival

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Dear blog,

We’re in the middle of the Manchester Literature Festival here at the moment (http://www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk/) and I’ve already seen some wonderful authors. Michael Frayn (author of the brilliant play Copenhagen about the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) and Claire Tomalin (who has just published a biography of Dickens) were really great, engaging and funny and thought-provoking. I also really enjoyed an event yesterday with Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin and Indian author Kishwar Desai. They both write about serious cultural and political issues but with very different approaches in their books, Tender Hooks and Witness the Night, respectively. I very much enjoyed the Manchester Camerata’s performance on Friday night, with an interlude of poetry written by Michael Symmons-Roberts specially commissioned for the event.  There’s exciting stuff still to come too – poetry by Sean O’Brien and John McAuliffe tonight, Antonia Fraser on Harold Pinter on Wednesday and David Lodge on Friday.

I also had a lovely time listening to Dave Haslem’s ‘in conversation with’ Jarvis Cocker last night, which was nothing to do with the Literature Festival but instead part of another festival, the Manchester Weekender (http://www.creativetourist.com/the-manchester-weekender-2011). It didn’t seem as though there were hundreds of us sitting in a huge (and very beautiful) room in the Town Hall; somehow the event was really quite intimate and Jarvis’s responses seemed genuine and thoughtful. He mentioned the changes to University funding twice and it’s clearly something he feels strongly about. He speaks about it again in the Guardian’s G2 this morning.

Since my last blog post we had a north-west long nineteenth-century seminar, at the John Rylands library, which was very well attended. Sue Chaplin (Leeds Met University) gave an excellent paper on Hannah More’s Sacred Dramas  and Julie-Marie Strange (Manchester Uni) gave an equally excellent paper on father’s chair in working-class family homes in the nineteenth century.

I have a busy week this week, made even busier by a trip to London on Tuesday for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association awards ceremony, this year to be held at the Royal College of Pathologists. These are always wonderful events though that I would hate to miss, where the poetry prize winners read their poems and the essay prize is awarded by the Chairperson-judge, who this year is Penelope Lively.

More soon,

Sharon

Exeter and the Manchester Science Festival

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Dear blog,

So it’s week one and I’m just about to go to do my first lecture of the 2011-12 academic year on ‘The Self’ as part of the Romantic Period module… This will be followed by two tutorial groups for the same module. I still get excited and nervous at the start of the academic year.

I was in Exeter at the beginning of this week for the ‘Biology and Culture’ workshop organised by Angelique Richardson. It was an interesting few days with a real variety of people present, even some actual scientists! The first plenary speaker was Anne Fausto-Stirling, a biologist who was trying to find out more about the markers for a child’s gender development. She is challenging the traditional accounts of gender development (the toys children play with, the peer groups they associate with) and instead was looking at the interplay of voice and touch in the dyad of the mother-child relationship. The second speaker was Jay Clayton, who spoke of genome time, pointing out that the past, present, and future are all held in the gene, while the is also the very real sense of a gene’s inheritance. He likened this to Sassaure’s idea of simultaneous synchronic and diachronic axes in the sign.

We had lots of time for discussion over the two days, with the participants offering five-minute talks on the current issues in literature and science studies and on their sense of its future directions. Much came out of this; I’ve been mulling some things over ever since and probably will continue to do for some time. There was a general consensus that we need to persuade the public (and perhaps some scientists) of the importance of history, to deepen and contextualise the issues discussed today.

Booking is now available for my lecture on Humphry Davy (the chemist and poet) for the Manchester Science Festival, which will be followed by a workshop led by Wahida Amin, a PhD student working on Davy’s poetry. The event will take place on Monday 24th October, 6-8pm in City Library (Deansgate) Manchester: http://www.manchestersciencefestival.com/whatson/humphry-davy

Best,

 

Sharon

Freshers and the new academic year

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Dear blog,

Well the new academic year is upon us. It’s induction week this week and we met our new first years yesterday – they were all very excited and nervous, and raring to go. Many of them had read (and enjoyed) Mansfield Park, which is on the core Narrative Fictions and the Novel module and I’m hopeful that we’ll have a fair few interested in the Romantic Period after hearing their enthusiasm.

I’m busy preparing for the start of term – I’ll be teaching mainly on the Romantic Period module and my third-year option module Green Writing. There are some overlaps (such as Wordsworth) and I’ll be teaching some of the texts and authors that I most love. Green Writing presents an opportunity to think about the ways that literature can affect and change people’s perceptions of the natural world and our place in it. I’m pleased to be teaching a module with such overt political interest and it’s always fascinating to hear the students’ views and opinions on such important matters. Economic issues have been taking media and political attention away from issues such as climate change recently and each year a new cohort of students has different perspective and values on the importance of the environment.

Next Monday I’ve been invited to attend a closed workshop on the subject of new directions in the study of literature and biology. Angelique Richardson at the University of Exeter is the organiser of this event (have a look at her marvellous book Love and Eugenics in the late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman) and there are some excellent participants. Some of us have been asked to prepare a five-minute position paper on the main issues in, and future possible directions of, literature and science studies. I went to a similar event in the summer at the University of Aberdeen and I’ve been thinking about the ideas that were raised there ever since. In anticipation, I’ve been reading Charlotte Sleigh’s excellent Palgrave guidebook Literature and Science, which I urge all to read who have an interest in the subject.

There are lots of interesting events coming up this academic year: English at Salford are offering a new course to Eccles Library on the general theme of ‘Memory, Text and Place’ teaching books that have a particular connection to the North West. I’m giving a lecture on Humphry Davy as part of the Manchester Science Festival in October, as well as talks in Bergen, Bart’s Hospital London, Edge Hill University, York University, Leeds University, and for the Open University. It’ll be busy but also fun.

More soon,

Sharon

BARS, the book, and Shelley’s Ghost

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Dear blog,

The BARS conference that I went to at the end of July was excellent. It as really nice to catch up with people, some of whom I’ve not seen for years, and there were some excellent papers. I particularly liked the Lucretius session organised by Rowan Boyson, who gave a great paper, as did Anne Janowitz and Martin Priestman. The session sent me back to Martin’s electronic edition of Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature (http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/darwin_temple/), which has such a great introduction by Martin himself. There were great plenary lectures too. My favourite was by Ina Ferris, who talked about contemporary theories of apparitions and how they could be used to describe what Scott was doing in his historical novels. William Christie gave an interesting paper too on the science in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Adding this to the session called ‘Medical Humanities’ that I spoke in, with great papers given by Gavin Budge and Craig Franson, I think we can say that interest in the relationships between literature and science of the Romantic period is healthy and well.

Since then I’ve been working on my book: Creating Romanticism: the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s. I’ve been writing chapter three on the use of contemporary scientific accounts of reproduction, generation and organic growth as metaphors for literary composition. It’s difficult work and it’s very hard to find the time with all the other tasks I have to do. I’ve been reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria this past week, which is possibly the most famous account of literary creativity as organic process.

I’ve also been writing the end of award report for the AHRC LitSciMed project, which has been interesting work, thinking about what was achieved (both planned and unforeseen outcomes) by the programme. We’re working on the website, trying get the resources pages exactly right so that they can be of the greatest use to others in the future. I do hope that some of the collaborations that were formed during the course of the programme continue and flourish; that would be wonderful. The social space will disappear soon; we’ve moved some of the student work over to http://virtual-doc.salford.ac.uk/litscimed/. The LitSciMed blogs have been moved to here now too. Remember that the Facebook page is up and running (though it needs more people to post more events and news on it!) at http://www.facebook.com/LitSciMed.

Upcoming events to watch out for: the Manchester Literature Festival looks excellent again and I’ll be going to lots of it (http://www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk/) and the Manchester Science Festival is poised to publish its programme too (I’ll be doing a talk on Humphry Davy for this): http://www.manchestersciencefestival.com/. If you’re in the Lake District this summer, the Shelley’s Ghost exhibition is brilliant too: http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/events/index.asp?pageid=574.

More soon,

Sharon

 

End of LitSciMed events and Telling Lives

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Dear Blog,

So, the final LitSciMed event has come and gone. It was a great one too. Lots of interesting papers and discussions, some that really seemed appropriate for the conclusion of the whole programme. The students were as engaged and talkative as usual and whole thing was a pleasure. I’m quite sad that there will be no more…

I’ve done some totting up of figures and over the past year and a half we have had 65 students attend the training events, from 37 different institutions, and representing 11 disciplines (English was the biggest group, but we also met Historians (including Historians of Science and of Medicine), a Midwife, an Archaeologist, Sociologist, Philosopher, Art Historian, and Creative Writer). Four students completed the whole programme and many more attended a significant number of events. I’m waiting to hear the results of the evaluations but reading through them quickly it looked as though there were lots of good ideas raised for future activities. More on these soon but in the meantime, a Facebook page has been set up at: http://www.facebook.com/LitSciMed. Please do join and/or ‘like’ the page, as well as posting information and events that are relevant to the group.

One such event, which I went to last night, which may well be of interest to those who read this blog, is Telling Lives, a play performed as part of Manchester’s 24:7 Theatre Festival (http://www.247theatrefestival.co.uk/showtelling.html). The playwright Eric Norley found incredible (and incredibly sad) life stories of people incarcerated in Prestwich Asylum in the nineteenth century in the records that have survived of the asylum. These people were brought back to life by means of beautifully written dialogue and song. Actors carried the photographs taken of inmates when they arrived at the asylum and the whole thing was terribly poignant (I nearly cried early on during a scene where a father had to say goodbye to his daughter who was subject to uncontrollable fits). There was reference to the very dubious medical theories of the time too, in the form of a new warden who was confident that women’s madness was related to the uterus and thus systematically ‘measured’ them in ways that made the audience distinctly uncomfortable even though it was all hidden by a sheet. Overall, it was great, really well done I thought, and if you can get to see it, you should.

I’m off to Glasgow for the BARS conference on Thursday. There’s an impressive programme of speakers and it should be fun (www.glasgow.ac.uk/bars2011).

Best,

Sharon

Aberdeen, dynamic zones, and event 6

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Dear Blog,

The final ever LitSciMed programme event will take place at Leicester and Keele Universities this Thursday and Friday. It’ll be the end of a year and a half programme, which began with a very memorable event in St Deinol’s in January 2010. So much has happened since then and so many students have taken part in events! I’m planning to write a final report on the programme and reflect on its successes and challenges. I’ll certainly post something on this on this blog in the coming months.

I spent a very enjoyable and immensely useful three days in Aberdeen University last week with a select group who were called together by Ralph O’Connor (author of The Earth on Show, 2007) to consider ‘new directions’ in ‘science and literature’. The event brought together a lovely group of people from both history of science and literary studies to thrash out some important issues concerning our… what shall I call it… sub-discipline, field, ‘dynamic zone’ (this last was one of the delegate’s suggestions)? It was a great opportunity to think about what it is that we do, what is needed now, and hear others’ ideas on this. Personally, I shall be mulling these ideas over for some time and thinking far more carefully about my own methods and their justification in my work.

I really hope that the LitSciMed programme, which is officially titled ‘Theories and Methods: Literature, Science, and Medicine’ has also helped students to think about their methods and whether there really is such a thing as ‘LitSciMed’ or whatever we want to call it.

Next time I write, I shall include a report on our final event. Please can students who are coming along to the event make sure to give their opinions on the discussion group set up for this event – there’s only a few days to go… (http://litscimed.org/groups/event-6/forum). Thanks to Joanna and Darren for starting things off. I hope to see everyone’s name there over the next few days.

All best,

Sharon

Event 6, New York, and Website difficulties

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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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