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ESPaCH - School of English, Sociology, Politics & Contemporary History

Literature, Culture and Science

 Events

  • Professor Sharon Ruston will speak at the Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities conference in the University of Bergen, Norway, 27-28 October.
  • The Manchester Science Festival will take place between 23-30 October, with a number of events put on by the University of Salford, including a lecture and workshop on Humphry Davy the early nineteenth-century chemist and poet.
  • The final event of the AHRC doctoral training programme 'Theories and Methods: Literature, Science, and Medicine' took place in July 2011 at the Universities of Leicester and Keele.  

About this Cluster

The Literature, Culture and Science research cluster was created in 2009. It is headed up by Professor Sharon Ruston and includes Kate Adams, Janice Allan, Lucie Armitt, Carson Bergstrom, Scott Brewster, Peter Buse, Andrew Cooper and Gillian James. Each academic year, the Literature, Culture and Science cluster will hold a one-day symposium presenting the work-in-progress of its members. The cluster has six main strands, some of which overlap with the work of other research clusters in the Centre for Literary Studies. We are interested in:

  • the intersections between the literature and science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Allan, Armitt, Bergstrom, Cooper, Ruston);
  • literature and medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: particularly, monstrosity, the gothic, and psychoanalysis (Allan, Armitt, Brewster);
  • the history and use of technology in twentieth- and twenty-first century theatre and film (Adams, Buse);
  • science fiction and fantasy, in critical and creative practice (Armitt, James);
  • environmentalism and eco-criticism (Adams, Armitt, Ruston);
  • the interactive text in creative practice: prose, poetry, and performance (Adams, James)

Research students

Jessica Roberts, 'Vitalism in the Periodical Press' (PhD 2010-13)
Wahida Amin, ‘Science and Poetry: The Case of Humphry Davy’ (AHRC Funded PhD with the Royal Institution; 2009-12)
Abby Bentham, PhD on transgression and psychosis in literary, filmic and televisual texts (2009-12)
Lucy Burnett, PhD on contemporary eco poetics and poetry (2009-12)

Projects

Recent awards include:

  • Grants from the British Society for the History of Science in 2009, the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, a British Academy small research grant, and a Wellcome Trust grant in 2010 for the Collected Letters of Humphry Davy and his Circle project;
  • AHRC-funded research leave for Peter Buse’s cultural history of Polaroid photography (2007-08), and a Leverhulme Fellowship for the ‘Camera does the rest: Polaroid and Culture’ (2010);
  • An AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award (with the Royal Institution) to fund Wahida Amin’s work on the chemist Humphry Davy’s poetry, which commenced in 2009;
  • The appointment of Graduate Teaching Assistant and eco-poet Lucy Burnett in 2009;
  • Historian of Science, Professor Jan Golinski (University of New Hampshire) was a Visiting Campus Fellow at the University of Salford in the summer of 2009;
  • Sharon Ruston was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant for a project titled ‘Vital Romanticism: Literature, Science and Medicine in the Romantic Period’ in 2009. Also in 2009, the British Society for Literature and Science awarded funds to support the ‘Thomas de Quincey, Manchester and Medicine, 1785–1859’ conference held in December.

AHRC Doctoral Training Programme

From 2009 to 2011 the University of Salford led an AHRC-funded doctoral training programme to teach PhD students, ‘Theories and Methods: Literature, Science, and Medicine’. This training was delivered in collaboration with eleven other partners: the Universities of Keele, Leicester, Manchester, King’s College London and the London Consortium, and the Science Museum, National Maritime Museum, Museum of Science and Industry, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the Wellcome Library.

Key Publications

  • Adams, Kate, I Found this Dirt under my Fingernails Live Art at Emergency (The Green Room, Manchester, 2 October 2009): a performance exploring the tension between the everyday passage of time and a heightened sense of being in space and time.
  • Allan, Janice, ‘“Conversing with Monstrosities”: evolutionary theory and contemporary responses to the novels of Wilkie Collins’ in M. Llewellyn and D. Birch (eds), Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Palgrave, 2010).
  • ——, ‘Mrs Robinson v. Dr. Lane: a case “doubly interesting to the medical profession”’ in Mangham and Depledge (eds), The Female Body in Medicine and Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2010).
  • ——, and Melissa Adey, Social Collaboration: Joining Forces on the Digital Frontier (view publication)
  • ——, The Threshold of the real: A Site for Participatory Resistance in Blast Theory's Uncle Roy All Around You (2006) Body, Space & Technology Journal (view publication)
  • Armitt, Lucie, Fantasy Fiction (New York: Continuum, 2005).
  • ——, ‘Photographing the gh(o)(a)stly image of undercover femininity’ in Scott Brewster et al (eds.), Inhuman Reflections (MUO, 2000), 138–49.
  • Bergstrom, Carson, 'Literary Coteries, Network Theory, and The Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester', in: Literary Coteries in the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Delaware Press, 2010).
  • ——, 'James Thomson's "A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton" and the Revisions to The Seasons: New Science and Poetics in the Eighteenth Century', in: Poetics in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Lehigh University Press, 2010).
  • ——, The Rise of New-Science Epistemological, Linguistic, and Ethical Ideals and the Lyric Genre in the Eighteenth Century (Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).
  • Brewster, Scott, ‘Alien Induction: Hypnosis, Writing, Authority.’ Inhuman Reflections: Thinking the Limits of the Human. Eds. Brewster, Joughin, Owen and Walker. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000: 120-137.
  • ——, ‘Psychoanalysis.’ The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 13: 2003. Ed. Martin McQuillan. Oxford/ English Association: Oxford University Press, 2005: 81-97.
  • Buse, Peter, 'Polaroid after digital: Technology, cultural form, and the social practices of snapshot photography', Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (forthcoming)
  • ——, 'The Polaroid Image as Photo Object', Journal of Visual Culture, 9(2), pp.1-19 (2010)
  • ——, ‘Surely Fades Away: Polaroid Photography and the Contradictions of Cultural Value’, Photographies 1:2 (2008).
  • ——, ‘Photography Degree Zero: Cultural history of the Polaroid Image’, new formations 62 (2007), 29-44.
  • James, Gill, The Prophecy (London: The Red Telephone, 2009).
  • ——, Scum Bag (Cambridge: Butterfly Press, 2008).
  • ——, The Lombardy Grotto (Cambridge: Butterfly Press, 2008).
  • Kendall, Judy, with digital artist Steven Earnshaw, digital interactive and animated poems: http://www.digital.salford.ac.uk/page/Digita_Poetry.
  • Ruston, Sharon, 'Authority and Imposture: William Godwin and the Animal Magnetists', in Liberating Medicine, ed. by Tristanne Connolly and Stephen Clark (Pickering and Chatto, 2009).
  • ——, ed., ‘Literature and Science’, Essays and Studies, 61 (2008).
  • ——, Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Future Publications, Projects and Work-in-progress

  • Kate Adams is leading Slow Art, a collective of artists and others interested in discussing and making slow art, which asks how can we work, create and exhibit slowly, and how can we re-engage the slow self of our audiences or participants? The Slow Art collective is currently engaged in a Letter Writing project.
  • With a small grant from the Institute for Social, Policy and Cultural Research, Peter Buse has been testing the properties of some of the last remaining stock of Polaroid 600 film, with due care and attention to such issues as light, climactic conditions, depth of focus, colour palette.
  • Gill James has launched her book, which has a Science Fiction background, Babel. James is editing the second part, has started the third volume, and has posted a webblog which bridges volumes two and three. When Babel comes out in September 2010, James will be taking down the Rozia Blog and posting it again, having edited it, in “real time”, until Peace Child comes out in 2011. (See http://roziasglog.blogspot.com/  and http://gilljames.blogspot.com/)
  • Kendall, Judy, monograph on Edward Thomas ‘Out in the dark’: Edward Thomas’s Composing Processes, dealing in part with eco-criticism (forthcoming).
  • Sharon Ruston has begun work on an edition of Collected Letters of Humphry Davy and his Circle with a team of Davy scholars including Professor Frank James (Royal Institution), Professor Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent University), Professor Jan Golinski (University of New Hampshire) and Professor David Knight (University of Durham). See the Davy letters website here.

Undergraduate Teaching

There are a number of modules that deal with relationships between science, medicine and literature, including The Romantic Period and Victorian Literature (level 2). In other modules the concerns of this research cluster are a particular focus, including: Monstrous Bodies (level two), Creating Visual Text (level 2), Green Writing (level 3), Writing the City (level 3), Gothic: Modernity and Monstrosity (MA level), Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Madmen (MA level).

Previous Events

  • Lucie Armitt convened a doctoral training workshop on 'Feminist cyber/sf fiction' for the PG CWWN training event held at the University of Leicester on 23rd October;
  • Sharon Ruston gave a lecture and seminar on ‘The Science of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ as part of this year’s Manchester Science Festival in October 2010;
  • 30th June 2010: 'Reading, Writing and Performing Mental Health and Well-Being', a one-day symposium examining the connections between the Humanities and Mental Health in the University of Salford.
  • 27th January 2010: Slow Art in Progress event at the University of Salford. 
  • 15th January 2010: one day symposium for the Literature, Culture and Science research cluster: speakers included Dr Laurence Coupe (MMU) and Professor Clare Brant (KCL). 
  • 4th–8th January 2010: Theories and Methods: Literature, Science, and Medicine. A five-day residential event, held at St Deinol’s Library in Hawarden, for twenty PhD students. 
  • 4th December 2009: one-day conference: ‘Thomas de Quincey, Manchester and Medicine, 1785–1859’ held at the University of Salford, sponsored by the British Association for Romantic Studies and the British Society for Literature and Science.

Beyond the Literature, Culture and Science Research Cluster?

The research cluster intersects with a number of the wider University’s research objectives, from three of the five strategic themes identified in scoping studies (health, energy, media), to public engagement work being done in other schools, and to related research in the School of Media, Music and Performance. Within and beyond our own Research Institute, there are particular interests in Science and Technology Studies (Alison Adam), in issues of public engagement (Bellaby, Ricci, Flynn), and in digital studies. Myriam Salama-Carr in the School of Languages has co-guest edited a special edition of the journal The Translator on ‘Science in Translation’ (17: 2, 2011). Composer Alan Williams worked with Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre and the BBC to create Wonder: A Scientific Oratorio and Lecturer in Future Media, Yu-Wei Lin works on ‘hacker culture’ (School of Media, Music, and Performance). We are also beginning to form links with the Mental Health Unit in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, and with the Urban Nature group at the University of Salford.