LitSciPod: The Literature and Science Podcast
By LitSciPod
Welcome to LitSciPod: The Literature and Science Podcast! We are eager to talk interdisciplinarity, the similarities and differences between humanities and STEM subjects and feature interviews with leading scholars every episode.
LitSciPod: The Literature and Science PodcastMay 26, 2021
00:00
01:04:42
Clusters, Cybernetics & Communication
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
This sixth episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with Dr Heather Love, Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Waterloo (Canada). Heather discusses her work on cybernetics in the works of Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf, as well as modernism and diagnosis. She introduces us to her new project on obstetrics and explores her unique relationship with the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Together, we consider the importance of the concept of the cluster to her research.
At the end of the episode, you can hear Heather read an excerpt from Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937).
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
• Gabriel Roberts, “ The Humanities in Modern Britain: Challenges and Opportunities”, Higher Education Policy Institute (2021)
• Lord Browne, “Securing a sustainable future for higher education: an independent review of higher education funding and student finance” (2010)
• Royal Society, “Jobs are changing, so should education” (2019)
• Heather Love, “The Cluster as Interpretive Gesture” in “Traces”, Open Thresholds (2017): http://openthresholds.org/2/clusterasinterpretivegesture.
• Love, “Newsreels, Novels, and Cybernetics: Reading the Random Patterns of John Dos Passos's U.S.A.”, Journal of Modern Literature
• Janet Galligani Casey, Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine (1998)
• Walter Pater, The Renaissance
• William James, The Principles of Psychology
• Ross Ashby, “The Black Box”, An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956).
• Sylvan Thompkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Positive Affects (1962)
• Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)
•Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (1915–38)
• Paul Jaussen, Writing in Real Time: Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital (2017)
• John Dos Passos, USA Trilogy (1930–6); Manhattan Transfer (1925)
• Love, “Cybernetic Modernism and the Feedback Loop: Ezra Pound’s Poetics of Transmission”, Modernism/modernity (2016)
• Joy Division, “Transmission”, Novelty (1979)
•Ezra Pound, Cantos LII–LXXI (1940)
• Woolf, “Character in Fiction” The Criterion (1924)
• Ford Madox Ford, “On Impressionism,” Poetry and Drama (1913)
• Rudolf Arnheim, Rundfunk als hörkunst (1933), translated as Radio as Sound (1936)
• University of Waterloo, Co-op Program (https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/co-op); Master of Arts in Experimental Digital Media (https://uwaterloo.ca/english/xdm)
• Siegfried Zielinski, [. . . After the Media]: News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century (2013)
• Love & Lisa Mendelman, Modernism and Diagnosis in Modernism/modernity Print Plus 6.2 (2021): https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0198
• Kevin Jackson, Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One (2012)
• Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (2015)
Stephens, “Stars in My Pocket Like Bits of Data: The poetics of information overload”, Guernica (15 July 2015)
• Robertson Collection, Museum of Healthcare at Kingston. See https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/objects-of-intrigue-museum-of-health-care-moulages
Sep 30, 202101:02:46
Episode 5: Nature in Crisis; Creativity as Cure
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
This fifth episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with Dr John Holmes, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. John discusses how poetry helps us to negotiate the legacies of Darwin’s discoveries and the Pre-Raphaelites’ shaping of the culture of Victorian science (and vice versa). He introduces us to the Synopsis Network, which explores art in natural history museums, to the Ruskin Land project in the Wyre Forest, and to his more recent work responding to COP26 from an humanities perspective. We also debate the importance of method to disciplines.
At the end of the episode, you can hear John read ‘Editorial. By the President of the Therolinguistics Association’ from ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics" by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
• Catherine Charlwood, ‘“Such a pair!”: The Twin Lives of Humans and Trees’, Hay Festival 2019
• Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century (1995)
• Susanne Bach and Folkert Degenring (eds), Dark Nights, Bright Lights: Night, Darkness, and Illumination in Literature (2015)
• Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020)
• Isabelle Tree, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm (2018)
• Russell Foster, Understanding the Impact of Sleep Loss in the Industrial Era (2018)
• Jules Michelet, Le Peuple (1846)
• John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings, ed. by Clive Wilmer (Penguin, 1985)
• The Symbiosis Network
• Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest, Guild of St George
• John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution
• The Kogi people, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1990)
• The Kogi people, Aluna (2012)
• The Germ (1850)
• John Holmes, ‘Rebels art and science: the empirical drive of the Pre-Raphaelites’ Nature 562, 490-491 (2018)
• Charles Allston Collins, Covent Thoughts (1850-51)
• William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1851-53)
• The Fairy Creek Blockcade
• FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992)
• Alberta’s Energy “War Room” takes on a Netflix family cartoon
• Bigfoot Family (2020)
• Michael E. Mann tweet 17th October 2020
• Yu-Tzu Wu et al., Perceived and objective availability of green and blue spaces and quality of life in people with dementia: results from the IDEAL programme (2021)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
This fifth episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with Dr John Holmes, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. John discusses how poetry helps us to negotiate the legacies of Darwin’s discoveries and the Pre-Raphaelites’ shaping of the culture of Victorian science (and vice versa). He introduces us to the Synopsis Network, which explores art in natural history museums, to the Ruskin Land project in the Wyre Forest, and to his more recent work responding to COP26 from an humanities perspective. We also debate the importance of method to disciplines.
At the end of the episode, you can hear John read ‘Editorial. By the President of the Therolinguistics Association’ from ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics" by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
• Catherine Charlwood, ‘“Such a pair!”: The Twin Lives of Humans and Trees’, Hay Festival 2019
• Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century (1995)
• Susanne Bach and Folkert Degenring (eds), Dark Nights, Bright Lights: Night, Darkness, and Illumination in Literature (2015)
• Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020)
• Isabelle Tree, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm (2018)
• Russell Foster, Understanding the Impact of Sleep Loss in the Industrial Era (2018)
• Jules Michelet, Le Peuple (1846)
• John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings, ed. by Clive Wilmer (Penguin, 1985)
• The Symbiosis Network
• Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest, Guild of St George
• John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution
• The Kogi people, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1990)
• The Kogi people, Aluna (2012)
• The Germ (1850)
• John Holmes, ‘Rebels art and science: the empirical drive of the Pre-Raphaelites’ Nature 562, 490-491 (2018)
• Charles Allston Collins, Covent Thoughts (1850-51)
• William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1851-53)
• The Fairy Creek Blockcade
• FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992)
• Alberta’s Energy “War Room” takes on a Netflix family cartoon
• Bigfoot Family (2020)
• Michael E. Mann tweet 17th October 2020
• Yu-Tzu Wu et al., Perceived and objective availability of green and blue spaces and quality of life in people with dementia: results from the IDEAL programme (2021)
Aug 30, 202101:11:53
Episode 4 - Narratives and Mental Time-Travel
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
This fourth episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with Professor Simon John James (@ProfSJJames) of Durham University. A well-established literary critic of the nineteenth-century novel, Simon discusses his long-standing interests in the relationship between literature and science: its historical origins and H. G. Wells’s role, all the way up to what scientists and literary critics can offer each other today. Given Simon’s role in the Durham Commission on Creativity in Education, we also discuss the importance of an interdisciplinary perspective within our schooling systems.
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015)
The 1870 Education Act
Simon James, ‘Literature and Science’ (2011)
Richard Bower and Simon James, ‘Time travel: a conversation between a physicist and a literature professor’ (2017)
Simon James, ‘Science journals: The worlds of H. G. Wells’, Nature 537, 162–164 (2016), doi.org/10.1038/537162a
Durham Commission on Creativity in Education (2019)
Tom McCleish, The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (2019)
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
This fourth episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with Professor Simon John James (@ProfSJJames) of Durham University. A well-established literary critic of the nineteenth-century novel, Simon discusses his long-standing interests in the relationship between literature and science: its historical origins and H. G. Wells’s role, all the way up to what scientists and literary critics can offer each other today. Given Simon’s role in the Durham Commission on Creativity in Education, we also discuss the importance of an interdisciplinary perspective within our schooling systems.
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015)
The 1870 Education Act
Simon James, ‘Literature and Science’ (2011)
Richard Bower and Simon James, ‘Time travel: a conversation between a physicist and a literature professor’ (2017)
Simon James, ‘Science journals: The worlds of H. G. Wells’, Nature 537, 162–164 (2016), doi.org/10.1038/537162a
Durham Commission on Creativity in Education (2019)
Tom McCleish, The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (2019)
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003)
Jul 12, 202159:04
Episode 3 - An Educational Bind
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
This third episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with education researcher and recent DPhil graduate Dr Ashmita Randhawa (@Rand_Ash). Through a discussion of Ashmita’s thesis on studio schools, we consider educational policy, STEM and the language of aspiration, and the long history of STEM shortages. At the end of the episode, you can hear Ashmita read Sarah Key’s poem ‘Be’. You can watch Sarah Kay reading it here www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_if_i_should_have_a_daughter?language=en
Materials discussed:
Catherine Charlwood, ‘“Context is all: Science, society and the novel’, English Review, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2021)
Ashmita Randhawa, STEM and the Studio: understanding the role of Studio Schools in technical education, DPhil thesis
James Robson, Ashmita Randhawa, and Ewart Keep, ‘Employability Skills in Studio Schools: Investigating the use of the CREATE Framework’. London: The Edge Foundation, 2018 http://www. edge. co. uk/sites/default/files/documents/create_final_report_december2018_1.pdf
Melissa Dickson, ‘Knocking Some Sense into Them: Overpressure Debates and the Education of Mind and Body’ in Anxious times: medicine and modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, eds. Amelia Bonea, Melissa Dickson, Sally Shuttleworth and Jennifer Wallis, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, University of Pittsburgh Press (2019), pp. 158-89
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
This third episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with education researcher and recent DPhil graduate Dr Ashmita Randhawa (@Rand_Ash). Through a discussion of Ashmita’s thesis on studio schools, we consider educational policy, STEM and the language of aspiration, and the long history of STEM shortages. At the end of the episode, you can hear Ashmita read Sarah Key’s poem ‘Be’. You can watch Sarah Kay reading it here www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_if_i_should_have_a_daughter?language=en
Materials discussed:
Catherine Charlwood, ‘“Context is all: Science, society and the novel’, English Review, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2021)
Ashmita Randhawa, STEM and the Studio: understanding the role of Studio Schools in technical education, DPhil thesis
James Robson, Ashmita Randhawa, and Ewart Keep, ‘Employability Skills in Studio Schools: Investigating the use of the CREATE Framework’. London: The Edge Foundation, 2018 http://www. edge. co. uk/sites/default/files/documents/create_final_report_december2018_1.pdf
Melissa Dickson, ‘Knocking Some Sense into Them: Overpressure Debates and the Education of Mind and Body’ in Anxious times: medicine and modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, eds. Amelia Bonea, Melissa Dickson, Sally Shuttleworth and Jennifer Wallis, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, University of Pittsburgh Press (2019), pp. 158-89
May 26, 202101:04:42
Episode 2 - Engines of Ingenuity
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
This second episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with modern linguist, early modernist and Francophile Dr Jennifer Oliver (@jenhelenoliver) discussing shipwrecks and technological developments.
Materials discussed:
Gordon Lightfoot, “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzTkGyxkYI)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1875–6,1918)
About the Edmund Fitzgerald: www.shipwreckmuseum.com/edmund-fitzgerald/the-fateful-journey/
Maritime Museum of the Great Lakes: www.marmuseum.ca/
Josephine Mandamin’s Water Walker movement: www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/trekking-the-great-lakes-on-foot-to-raise-awareness-about-water-pollutants-1.4161467
Truth and Reconciliation: the legacy of Canada’s residential schools: nctr.ca/reports.php
Great Lakes Guardian’s Council: www.ontario.ca/page/great-lakes-guardians-council
Walter de la Mare, “The Wreck”, The Veil and Other Poems (1922)
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1899)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
Sea Shanties
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-55661351
Noise Pollution
Duarte, et al. “The soundscape of the Anthropocene ocean”, Science, Vol. 371, Issue 6529 (5 Feb 2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.aba4658 (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6529/eaba4658)
Walruses
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56404484
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-56470235
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
This second episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with modern linguist, early modernist and Francophile Dr Jennifer Oliver (@jenhelenoliver) discussing shipwrecks and technological developments.
Materials discussed:
Gordon Lightfoot, “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzTkGyxkYI)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1875–6,1918)
About the Edmund Fitzgerald: www.shipwreckmuseum.com/edmund-fitzgerald/the-fateful-journey/
Maritime Museum of the Great Lakes: www.marmuseum.ca/
Josephine Mandamin’s Water Walker movement: www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/trekking-the-great-lakes-on-foot-to-raise-awareness-about-water-pollutants-1.4161467
Truth and Reconciliation: the legacy of Canada’s residential schools: nctr.ca/reports.php
Great Lakes Guardian’s Council: www.ontario.ca/page/great-lakes-guardians-council
Walter de la Mare, “The Wreck”, The Veil and Other Poems (1922)
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1899)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
Sea Shanties
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-55661351
Noise Pollution
Duarte, et al. “The soundscape of the Anthropocene ocean”, Science, Vol. 371, Issue 6529 (5 Feb 2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.aba4658 (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6529/eaba4658)
Walruses
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56404484
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-56470235
Apr 13, 202101:12:39
Episode 1 - Science Alone Can't Save Us
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
This first episode of the new, third series of LitSciPod sees the co-hosts reflecting on what the pandemic has taught us about the indivisible connection between the humanities and the sciences. We cover vaccine communications and vaccine hesitancy, Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s reflections on scientific truth, and books which have got us thinking.
Materials discussed:
Sally Frampton, ‘Vaccine scepticism is as old as vaccines themselves. Here's how to tackle it’ The Guardian (23 Feb 2021): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/23/vaccine-scepticism-how-to-tackle-it
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (Faber, 2021)
Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021)
Charlotte Sleigh, “The abuses of Popper,” Aeon (16 Feb 2021): https://aeon.co/essays/how-popperian-falsification-enabled-the-rise-of-neoliberalism
What Laura & Catherine have been reading:
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889)
Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife (2020)
Daisy Johnson, Sisters (2020)
Lucy Hughes-Hallet, Fabulous (2019)
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1899)
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918)
Kevin N. Laland, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (2017)
Mar 08, 202134:24
Episode 6 - Mind your Matter: Science and Victorian Poetry
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
The sixth episode of the second series of LitSciPod is all about analogy and language shared between literature (especially poetry), science, and science writing.
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Greg Tate (@drgregorytate), Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of St Andrews. Greg shares his research on matter, form, and rhythm in nineteenth century poetry and the physical sciences. He asks why there is so much poetry in the science writing of the period (and even today) and what that says about the connections between literature and science. Greg also discusses how Hardy’s poetry draws on Einstein’s theory of relativity, why the concept of the ether is so important to science and poetry.
At the end of the episode, you can hear Greg read an excerpt from Mathilde Blind’s The Ascent of Man (1889).
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Introduction:
Michael Faraday’s letter to sister Margaret quoted in Dafydd Tomos (ed.), Michael Faraday in Wales, including Faraday’s Journal of his Tour through Wales in 1819 (Denbigh, 1972), 58.
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)
Robert Frost, ‘A Patch of Old Snow’ (1916)
Interview:
Greg Tate, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences: Poetical Matter (Palgrave, 2019)
William Whewell’s review of J. Herschel's Preliminary discourse on the study of Natural Philosophy in The Quarterly Review 45.90 (1831), pp. 374-407.
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Absolute Explains’ (1924)
Hilaire Belloc, ‘The Fake Newdigate Poem’ (~1894)
Patrick Guthrie Tait and Balfour Steward, The Unseen Universe (1875)
Be sure to check out our new Tumblr page, which includes bonus material for each episode: litscipod.tumblr.com/.
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
About the episode:
The sixth episode of the second series of LitSciPod is all about analogy and language shared between literature (especially poetry), science, and science writing.
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Greg Tate (@drgregorytate), Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of St Andrews. Greg shares his research on matter, form, and rhythm in nineteenth century poetry and the physical sciences. He asks why there is so much poetry in the science writing of the period (and even today) and what that says about the connections between literature and science. Greg also discusses how Hardy’s poetry draws on Einstein’s theory of relativity, why the concept of the ether is so important to science and poetry.
At the end of the episode, you can hear Greg read an excerpt from Mathilde Blind’s The Ascent of Man (1889).
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Introduction:
Michael Faraday’s letter to sister Margaret quoted in Dafydd Tomos (ed.), Michael Faraday in Wales, including Faraday’s Journal of his Tour through Wales in 1819 (Denbigh, 1972), 58.
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)
Robert Frost, ‘A Patch of Old Snow’ (1916)
Interview:
Greg Tate, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences: Poetical Matter (Palgrave, 2019)
William Whewell’s review of J. Herschel's Preliminary discourse on the study of Natural Philosophy in The Quarterly Review 45.90 (1831), pp. 374-407.
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Absolute Explains’ (1924)
Hilaire Belloc, ‘The Fake Newdigate Poem’ (~1894)
Patrick Guthrie Tait and Balfour Steward, The Unseen Universe (1875)
Be sure to check out our new Tumblr page, which includes bonus material for each episode: litscipod.tumblr.com/.
Sep 04, 202053:36
Episode 5 - Thinking Historically: Public Health and the Military
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Robert C. Engen (@RobertEngen), Assistant Professor in the Department of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College. Robert discusses his interdisciplinary research on parallels between the military responses to the 1918 pandemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic, public health and global conflict, a project commemorating the Battle of Hill 70, as well as more recent work on the human dimension of AI in warfare. At the end of the episode, you can hear Robert read an extract from The Glass Bead by Herman Hesse.
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Introduction:
-Katie Russell, ‘“Arts subjects have as much value as STEM”: the new education campaign tackling the myth of 'soft' degrees’, The Telegraph (25 June 2020)
-Vanessa Thorpe, ‘University and Arts Council in drive to re-brand “soft” academic subjects’, The Guardian (21 June 2020)
Interview:
-Pamela K. Gilbert, Cholera and Nation (2008)
-Claire Hooker, Chris Degeling and Paul Mason, ‘Dying a Natural Death: Ethics
-Robert C. Engen, “CAF health protection during pandemic disease events: 1918 and 2020”, Journal of Veteran, Military, and Family Health (preprint, May 2020)
-Commonwealth War Graves Commission
-Robert C. Engen, Canadians Under Fire: Infantry Effectiveness in the Second World War (2009)
-Robert C. Engen, Strangers in Arms: Combat Motivation in the Canadian Army (2016)
-Robert C. Engen, Douglas Delaney, Meghan Fitzpatric (eds.) Military Education and the British Empire, 1815-1949 (2018)
-Museum of Healthcare at Kingston - Margaret Angus Fellowship
-Hill 70 project
-Robert C. Engen, Inhuman Dimensions of Warfare (blog)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Robert C. Engen (@RobertEngen), Assistant Professor in the Department of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College. Robert discusses his interdisciplinary research on parallels between the military responses to the 1918 pandemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic, public health and global conflict, a project commemorating the Battle of Hill 70, as well as more recent work on the human dimension of AI in warfare. At the end of the episode, you can hear Robert read an extract from The Glass Bead by Herman Hesse.
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Introduction:
-Katie Russell, ‘“Arts subjects have as much value as STEM”: the new education campaign tackling the myth of 'soft' degrees’, The Telegraph (25 June 2020)
-Vanessa Thorpe, ‘University and Arts Council in drive to re-brand “soft” academic subjects’, The Guardian (21 June 2020)
Interview:
-Pamela K. Gilbert, Cholera and Nation (2008)
-Claire Hooker, Chris Degeling and Paul Mason, ‘Dying a Natural Death: Ethics
-Robert C. Engen, “CAF health protection during pandemic disease events: 1918 and 2020”, Journal of Veteran, Military, and Family Health (preprint, May 2020)
-Commonwealth War Graves Commission
-Robert C. Engen, Canadians Under Fire: Infantry Effectiveness in the Second World War (2009)
-Robert C. Engen, Strangers in Arms: Combat Motivation in the Canadian Army (2016)
-Robert C. Engen, Douglas Delaney, Meghan Fitzpatric (eds.) Military Education and the British Empire, 1815-1949 (2018)
-Museum of Healthcare at Kingston - Margaret Angus Fellowship
-Hill 70 project
-Robert C. Engen, Inhuman Dimensions of Warfare (blog)
Jul 31, 202054:01
Episode 4 - Touching Contagion
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric). Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Kari Nixon (@HalfSickShadows). At the end of the episode, you can hear Kari read the poem ‘Inskripsjoner/Inscriptions’ bilingually in Norweigian and English by Tarjei Vesaas, trans. by Kenneth G. Chapman.
Episode resources:
Introduction:
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
Catherine Charlwood, ‘“Habitually Embodied” Memories: The Materiality and Physicality of Music in Hardy's Poetry’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479409819000338
Sile O’Modhrain and R. Brent Gillespie (2018) ‘Once More, with Feeling: Revisiting the Role of Touch in Performer-Instrument Interaction’. In: Papetti S., Saitis C. (eds) Musical Haptics. Springer Series on Touch and Haptic Systems. Springer, Cham
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)
Interview:
Pamela K. Gilbert, Cholera and Nation (2008)
Claire Hooker, Chris Degeling and Paul Mason, ‘Dying a Natural Death: Ethics and Political Activism for Endemic Infectious Disease’, in Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory, ed. by Kari Nixon and Lorenzo Servitje (2016), pp. 265-90
Anne Finger, Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (2013)
Giorgio Agamben, ‘L’invenzione di un’epidemia’ (25 February 2020)
The Art of Advertising. Bodleian Libraries (March to August 2020)
Robert Spear. ‘Arrest all dirt and cleanse everything.’ Hudson’s Dry Soap. The Sunday at Home (c. 1889)
Christopher Pittard, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (2011)
Henry Stacy Marks. ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness.’ A & F Pears Ltd (c. 1889)
Judith Walzer Levitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (1996)
Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2008)
Ellen Gutoskey, ‘Super Spreader: The Strange Story of Typhoid Mary’, Mental Floss (20 March 2020)
‘Influenza’ from the handwritten manuscript magazine for the Myllin Literary and Debating Society, number 1 (1898) held in the National Library of Wales archives
Kari Nixon, ‘I’m a Mom and a Vaccine Researcher. Here’s Why You Should Vaccinate Your Children’ HuffPost (25 April 2019)
Welsh Newspapers Online database, National Library of Wales
‘Vaccination Exemption’, South Wales Daily News (17 August 1899)
May 26, 202001:08:14
Episode 4 teaser
Teaser for Episode 4.
May 21, 202001:44
Episode 3 - Outbreak: A Two Cultures Pinch-Point
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric). Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Emilie Taylor-Pirie (@DrETaylorPirie, née Taylor-Brown), an Early Career Academic specialising in the intersections between literature, science and culture. Millie discusses nineteenth-century responses to malaria and how scientists couched their work in imaginative language; how studying a joint honours in English Literature and Biology set her up for an interdisciplinary career; the importance of being prepared for a zombie apocalypse; and much more! At the end of the episode, you can hear Millie read an extract from Henry Seton Merriman’s imperial romance novel With Edged Tools (1894): ‘The Accursed Camp’
Introduction:
- Kari Nixon, ‘The way we talk about coronavirus matters’, 3 March 2020, CNN.com
- Alice Bennett (@AlicePonderland), ‘A lot of people …’, Twitter, 20 March 2020
- Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn), ‘For those who didn't know …’, Twitter, 20 March 2020
- Susannah Walker (@QuadRoyal), ‘Full evisceration here: …’ Twitter, 20 Mar 2020
- Bex Lewis, Keep Calm and Carry On: The Truth Behind the Poster (2017)
- Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945 (1992)
- Museum of Healthcare at Kingston (Ontario), ‘Midwifery basin,’ From the Collection
- Amy Davidson Sorkin, ‘The Fever Room: Epidemics and Social Distancing in Bleak House and Jane Eyre’, New Yorker, 20 March 2020
- Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
- ‘Typhus Epidemic’, Evening News (17th Dec 1896), p. 3, Welsh Newspapers Online
Interview:
- Emilie Taylor-Brown, ‘(Re)Constructing the Knights of Science: Parasitologists and their Literary Imaginations’, Journal of Literature and Science 7.2 (2014) pp.62-79
- M. Easter-Ross, ‘Biblical Physics’, John O'Groat Journal, 30 December 1842, p.4
- Sydney Whiting, Memoirs of a Stomach (1853)
- F. P. Maynard, ‘Notes on the Examination of Malarial Blood’, Indian Medical Gazette 30.11 (1895) pp.412-20 (p.420)
- Ronald Ross, ‘Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes', Science Progress, 11.41 (1916), pp.137-40 (p.137)
- Emilie Taylor-Brown, ‘Death, Disease, and Discontent: The Monstrous Reign of the Supervirus’, in Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity: the Birth of the Monster in Literature, Media, and Film eds. Andrea Wood and Brandy Schillace (2014) pp.133-158
- Emilie Taylor-Pirie, 'The Art and Science of COVID-19', 16 March 2020, LinkedIn
- Center for Preparedness and Response, 'Zombie Preparedness', (page last reviewed Oct 2018), CDC
- https://washyourlyrics.com
Apr 05, 202054:36
Episode 3 Teaser
Coming soon... Outbreak: A Two Cultures Pinch-Point, feat. Dr Emilie Taylor-Brown
Mar 26, 202001:24
Episode 2 - The Work of Knowing
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric). Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Olivia Smith (@OliveFSmith), a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow based at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Olivia discusses her work on early modern life writing and biology, exploring the importance of cognition and recognition to the pre-history of scientific research. In a wide-ranging discussion, she covers archives, letters, objects philosophical and scientific, and the relationship of the early modern imagination to interdisciplinarity. Olivia also talks about her work with the charity Arts Emergency (@artsemergency) and the importance of a political argument for access to the creative arts. At the end of the episode, you can hear Olivia read the poem ‘A World in an Eare-ring’, by Margaret Cavendish (1623-73).
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Introduction
Sydney Ross, ‘Scientist: The Story of a Word’, Annals of Science, 18:2 (1962): 65-85
William Herschel, Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830)
Leah Knight, ‘Historicising Early Modern Literature and Science: Recent Topics, Trends, and Problems’, Journal of Literature and Science, 5:2 (2012): 56-60
John Donne, ‘Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star’
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’
Majorie Hope Nicholson, Science and Imagination (1956)
Steven Shapin and Simon Scahffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985)
Howard Marchitello, The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo (2011)
Carla Mazzio, ‘Shakespeare and Science, c. 1600’, South Central Review, 26:1&2 (2009): 1-23
Elizabeth Spiller, ‘Shakespeare and the Making of Early Modern Science: Resituating Prospero’s Art’, South Central Review, 26:1&2 (2009): 24-41
Interview
Lorraine Daston ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (1999)
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (2011)
Catherine Charlwood, ‘Recognizing “Something”: Robert Frost and Recognition Memory’, The Robert Frost Review, 29 (2019): 31-59
Terence Cave, Recognition: A Study in Poetics (1988)
Robert Frost, ‘A Patch of Old Snow’ (1916)
Frances Dickey, ‘Reports from the Emily Hale Archive’ (2020): https://tseliotsociety.wildapricot.org
Johannesburg Kepler, The six-cornered snowflake (1611)
www.arts-emergency.org
A. D. Nuttall, A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination (1974)
Margaret Cavendish, ‘A World in an Eare-Ring’ (1653)
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Society for Literature and Science Small Grants scheme, to enable us to make Series 2 of the podcast. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of LitSciPod - we enjoyed making it!
Mar 06, 202054:11
Episode 1 - Science Isn’t Separate
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric) Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Professor Sharon Ruston (@SharonRuston), Chair in Romanticism at Lancaster University’s Department of English and Creative Writing. Sharon is the author of Creating Romanticism (2013) and Shelley and Vitality (2005) and co-editor of the forthcoming Collected Letters of Sir Humphrey Davy. Sharon talks about her LitSci research on Mary Shelley, describes her MOOC on the nineteenth-century chemist Sir Humphrey Davy, and introduces her current project, crowdsourcing transcriptions for Davy’s notebooks. At the end of the episode, you can hear Sharon read an extract from Mary Shelley’s novelFrankenstein(1818).
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Introduction
● Alix Nathan, The Warlow Experiment (2019)
● Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019)
● Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019)
Interview
● Helen Edmundson, Mary Shelley ( 2012)
● Sally Frampton, Sarah Chaney and Sarah Punshon, Mind-Boggling Medical History:
mbmh.web.ox.ac.uk/home
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Society for Literature and Science Small Grants scheme, to enable us to make Series 2 of the podcast. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of LitSciPod - we enjoyed making it!
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Professor Sharon Ruston (@SharonRuston), Chair in Romanticism at Lancaster University’s Department of English and Creative Writing. Sharon is the author of Creating Romanticism (2013) and Shelley and Vitality (2005) and co-editor of the forthcoming Collected Letters of Sir Humphrey Davy. Sharon talks about her LitSci research on Mary Shelley, describes her MOOC on the nineteenth-century chemist Sir Humphrey Davy, and introduces her current project, crowdsourcing transcriptions for Davy’s notebooks. At the end of the episode, you can hear Sharon read an extract from Mary Shelley’s novelFrankenstein(1818).
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Introduction
● Alix Nathan, The Warlow Experiment (2019)
● Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019)
● Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019)
Interview
● Helen Edmundson, Mary Shelley ( 2012)
● Sally Frampton, Sarah Chaney and Sarah Punshon, Mind-Boggling Medical History:
mbmh.web.ox.ac.uk/home
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Society for Literature and Science Small Grants scheme, to enable us to make Series 2 of the podcast. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of LitSciPod - we enjoyed making it!
Feb 05, 202051:04
LitSciPod - Series 2 Trailer
LitSciPod is coming back for Series 2.
Jan 25, 202001:56
Minisode: Extinctions & Rebellions BSLS Symposium
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones
Laura and Catherine discuss the recent BSLS Winter Symposium on the theme of Extinctions and Rebellions, held at the University of Liverpool. If you weren’t able to make the event, we talk through the panels we attended (and between us we went to all of them!), the impact roundtable and our key takeaways from the day.
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard UP, 2011)
- Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves (Dancing Cat Books, 2017)
- E. W. Cooke, Grotesque Animals (Longmans, 1872)
- Sam Gayton, The Last Zoo (Random House, 2019)
The Errant Muse exhibition - a collaboration between artist Charlotte Hodes and poet Prof Deryn Rees-Jones - is at the Victoria Museum and Gallery, Liverpool, running from 16th November 2019 until 28th March 2020, open Tues-Sat 10am-5pm. Further details can be found here.
Nov 24, 201926:26
Minisode: An Overdue B/III/iii
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones
Laura and Catherine are (re)joined by a special guest: Dr Rachel Crossland, Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Chichester. Rachel takes the B/III/iii challenge while discussing how to talk about discoveries in physics past and present; the difficulties of being asked to know what you don’t yet know; and the relationship betwen the popular press and scientific ideas.
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)
'Problems of Description in the Language of Discovery', which was originally published in George Levine's One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Madison, Wis.: Wisconsin University Press, 1987)
'Discourses of the Island', in Frederick Amrine, ed., Literature and Science as Modes of Expression (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 1-27.
N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
Alistair Sponsel, 'Constructing a "revolution in science": the campaign to promote a favourable reception for the 1919 solar eclipse experiments', British Journal for the History of Science, 35/4 (December 2002), 439-67.
Simon Armitage, ‘Finishing It’ - read the poem and about the carving process here
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones
Laura and Catherine are (re)joined by a special guest: Dr Rachel Crossland, Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Chichester. Rachel takes the B/III/iii challenge while discussing how to talk about discoveries in physics past and present; the difficulties of being asked to know what you don’t yet know; and the relationship betwen the popular press and scientific ideas.
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)
'Problems of Description in the Language of Discovery', which was originally published in George Levine's One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Madison, Wis.: Wisconsin University Press, 1987)
'Discourses of the Island', in Frederick Amrine, ed., Literature and Science as Modes of Expression (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 1-27.
N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
Alistair Sponsel, 'Constructing a "revolution in science": the campaign to promote a favourable reception for the 1919 solar eclipse experiments', British Journal for the History of Science, 35/4 (December 2002), 439-67.
Simon Armitage, ‘Finishing It’ - read the poem and about the carving process here
Oct 25, 201921:26
Episode 6 - Inci-dental Humanities
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Peter Fifield, Lecturer in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Peter relates how his interest in bodies and their ailments grew out of his work on Samuel Beckett, discussing where his research and teaching intersects with #litsci and the medical humanities. Peter also debates whether Dorothy Richardson has written “the great dentistry novel” and introduces his current project, Sick Literature, which considers a range of non-psychological illnesses and ailments as well as explore the gendered assumptions that underpin early twentieth century understanding of illness. At the end of the episode, you can hear Peter read an extract from Dorothy Richardson’s novel The Tunnel (1919).
Episode resources (in order of appearance):
Introduction
- Alexander Stewart’s patent at the Wellcome Collection
- Advertisement for Templar Malins dentist in Cardiff at the Glamorgan Archives.
- Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye (2008)
- Crawford Dental Collection at the Museum of Healthcare at Kingston
- The Sanitary Record
- Diseases of Modern Life database: over 3000 sources are documented (for free!) covering the intersections between literary, scientific and medical culture in the C19th. Also includes links to those which are freely available online: have a rummage here https://diseasesofmodernlife.web.ox.ac.uk/database
- ‘Influenza’ from the handwritten manuscript magazine for the Myllin Literary and Debating Society, number 1 (1898) held in the National Library of Wales archives
- Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (1791)
Interview
- Frank Norris McTeague (1899)
- Dorothy Richardson, The Tunnel (1919)
- James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of LitSciPod - we enjoyed making it!
Aug 16, 201901:05:50
Episode 5 - Epigenetics, Race, Activism
Episode 5: Epigenetics, Race, Activism
Or, Who are we and what do we think we’re doing?
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Lara Choksey (@larachoksey), postdoctoral research associate at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. In addition to discussing #litsci aspects of her research and teaching, Lara also explores the intricacies of the language we use to talk about such topics as colonialism, her work with the Global Warwickshire Collective, and what #litsci might be able to offer in terms of decolonising the curriculum, or combating racism.
At the end of the episode, you can hear Lara read an extract from Saidiya Hartman’s, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2006).
Episode resources:
- Michael Symmons Roberts, ‘To John Donne’ and ‘Mapping the Genome’
- John Akomfrah (dir.), The Nine Muses (2010)
- Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)
- Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (2000)
- Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique (1809)
- Doris Lessing, "The Whitehorn Letters" (1944-1949)
- ---- Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
- ---- Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-1983)
- Barbara McClintock, "The Significance of Responses of the Genome to Challenge." (1983)
- The Double Helix history project, https://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/english/research/projects/double-helix-history/
Farah Mendlesohn writes in the "Introduction" to The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, "Language is not trustworthy in sf: metaphor becomes literal." ed. E. James and F.Mendlesohn (CUP, 2003).
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of LitSciPod - we enjoyed making it!
Jul 06, 201959:20
Episode 4 - Tell it Like a Story
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Will Abberley (@WillAbberley), Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Sussex. In addition to discussing #litsci aspects of his research and teaching, Will also explores language in scientific writings, biology and the imagination, human effects on the environment, and the importance of communicating to a broad public.
At the end of the episode, you can hear Will read Grant Allen’s article ‘Strictly Incog’ from the Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 44 (Feb 1887): 142-57.
Episode resources:
Books mentioned:
- Meredith Hooper, The Pebble in my Pocket: A History of Our Earth (Viking Children’s Books, 1996)
- Adelene Buckland, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
- Adelene Buckland, ‘Thomas Hardy, Provincial Geology and the Material Imagination,’ 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, (6), DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.469.
- Gideon Mantell, The Wonders of Geology, 6th ed., 1848
- Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (Tinsley Brothers, 1883)
- Michael R. Page, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (Ashgate, 2012)
- Laura Ludtke, ‘MICHAEL R. PAGE, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology,’ Notes and Queries, Vol, 62, No. 3, (Sep 2015): 480–82, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjv110
Websites of interest:
- Narrative Science project at the London School of Economics, https://www.narrative-science.org
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of LitSciPod - we enjoyed making it!
Jun 01, 201948:32
Episode 3 - How Many Cultures?
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Will Tattersdill (@WillTattersdill), Senior Lecturer in Popular Literature at the University of Birmingham. In addition to discussing #litsci aspects of his research and teaching, Will also explores disciplinary boundaries, science fiction, dinosaurs in science and culture (including Dinotopia!), the status of popular literature in the university, and the importance of education and outreach.
At the end of the episode, you can hear Will read the end of H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine (1895)
Episode resources:
Books mentioned:
Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Routledge, 2000)
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Houghton Mifflin, 1934)
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Croom Helm, 1976)
Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Sage, 1997).
If you want to become more familiar with the Two Cultures debate, here are some of the articles and books Laura and Catherine mention in the episode:
Thomas H. Huxley, ‘Science and Culture’ (1880)
Matthew Arnold, ‘Literature and Science’ (1882)
C. P. Snow, ‘The Two Cultures’ (1959)
F. R. Leavis, ‘Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow’ (1962)
George Levine, ed. One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)
Frank Furedi, Roger Kimball, Raymond Tallis and Robert Whelan, eds., From Two Cultures To No Culture: CP Snow’s Two Cultures’ Lecture Fifty Years On (Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 2009)
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of LitSciPod - we enjoyed making it!
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Will Tattersdill (@WillTattersdill), Senior Lecturer in Popular Literature at the University of Birmingham. In addition to discussing #litsci aspects of his research and teaching, Will also explores disciplinary boundaries, science fiction, dinosaurs in science and culture (including Dinotopia!), the status of popular literature in the university, and the importance of education and outreach.
At the end of the episode, you can hear Will read the end of H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine (1895)
Episode resources:
Books mentioned:
Phyllis Weliver, Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Routledge, 2000)
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Houghton Mifflin, 1934)
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Croom Helm, 1976)
Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Sage, 1997).
If you want to become more familiar with the Two Cultures debate, here are some of the articles and books Laura and Catherine mention in the episode:
Thomas H. Huxley, ‘Science and Culture’ (1880)
Matthew Arnold, ‘Literature and Science’ (1882)
C. P. Snow, ‘The Two Cultures’ (1959)
F. R. Leavis, ‘Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow’ (1962)
George Levine, ed. One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)
Frank Furedi, Roger Kimball, Raymond Tallis and Robert Whelan, eds., From Two Cultures To No Culture: CP Snow’s Two Cultures’ Lecture Fifty Years On (Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 2009)
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of LitSciPod - we enjoyed making it!
May 03, 201951:06
Episode 2 – The T in STEM
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by: Gareth Jones
About this episode:
In this episode, Laura and Cathy dive into the STEM vs. the humanities debate, discussing how funding in post-secondary institutions widens the divide between the humanities and STEm subjects. This week's interview features Alex Goody, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature in the Department of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University. After the interview, you can hear Alex read Mina Loy’s poem, ‘Human Cylinders.’
Bio for Alex Goody:
After completing her PhD on 'Mina Loy’s Modernist Aesthetic’ at the University of Leeds, Dr Goody taught at Falmouth University before joining Oxford Brookes. Her research interests and teaching spans the field of modernist studies, encompasses technology and literature, considers the work of the modernist poets and novelists Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, as well as New York Dada, jewish writing, modernist drama, and radio. We highly recommend you read Technology, Literature and Culture, (Polity Press, 2011).
Episode resources:
If you want to become more familiar with the Humanities vs STEM debate, here are some of the articles and books Laura and Catherine mention in the episode:
- Schmidt, ‘The Humanities are in Crisis’.
- Rustin, ‘Why study English? We’re poorer in every sense without it’.
- ‘Patterns and trends in UK Higher Education’.
- Olejarz, ‘Liberal Arts in the Data Age'.
- Wadhwa, 'Why liberal arts and the humanities are as important as engineering’.
- Anders, ‘That 'Useless' Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech's Hottest Ticket’.
- Bate, The Public Value of the Humanities (Bloomsbury, 2011)
- Collini, What Are Universities For? (Penguin 2012)
- Small, The Value of the Humanities (Oxford University Press 2013)
- Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Random House Canada, 2007
- 'Universities likely to cut number of staff due to Brexit uncertainty'.
Resources mentioned in the interview with Alex Goody: Hales: Unthought: The Power Of The Cognitive Nonconscious; Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter; Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City; Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
- Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde.
- Loy materials on the Beinecke Rare Books Library website.
You can read Mina Loy, ‘Human Cylinders’ here and Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Railway Children’’ here.
Mar 24, 201955:43
Episode 1 - What Even is Literature and Science?
Episode One: What even is Literature and Science?
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones
In the first episode of LitSciPod, hosts Laura and Catherine set out to define the field of Literature and Science, which is concerned with investigating and challenging the disciplinary boundaries between the study and practice of literature and that of science. They also tackle one of the most important issues in Literature and Science: how the classroom and the education reinforce these boundaries, often referred to colloquially as the “Two Cultures,’ after the title of C. P. Snow’s (in)famous Rede Lecture in 1959.
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Rachel Crossland (@DrRCrossland, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chichester, whose book, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, was published in 2018 by the Oxford University Press. In addition to discussing the obstacles to the study of Literature and Science at university in the UK, Rachel also explores the personal connections that underpin the #litsci aspects of her research and teaching.
At the end of the episode, you can hear Rachel read Rebecca Elson’s poem, ‘Explaining Relativity.’
For further reading, Laura and Catherine recommend:
Crossland, Rachel. Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Oxford University Press. 2018.
Elson, Rebecca. A Responsibility to Awe. Carcanet Press. 2001.
Hayles, N. Katherine. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. Cornell University Press. 1984.
Sleigh, Charlotte. Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan. 2011.
Whitworth, Michael. Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford University Press. 2001.
About the hosts:
Laura’s research investigates the connections between technology, gender, politics, and aesthetics in the city in late-Victorian, Edwardian, and Modernist literature. Her current project, Reading London’s Lightscapes, 1880–1950, considers literary and cultural responses to the electrification of London at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Laura has worked as an educator at handful of museums and nature centres across Canada as well as at undergraduate and graduate level in Canada and the UK.
Catherine’s research interests lie in poetic form, how experimental/cognitive psychology can be read productively alongside literature and all things memory-related. She’s writing a book on memory in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, and has also published on memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction. More recently, Catherine’s been looking at how literary and scientific knowledge proliferated alike in the nineteenth century, and is researching mutual improvement and literary societies in nineteenth-century Wales. A former schoolteacher, she has a particular interest in questions concerning education.
We would love to hear what you think about our first episode, so if you have feedback, please email us at litscipod@gmail.com
Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones
In the first episode of LitSciPod, hosts Laura and Catherine set out to define the field of Literature and Science, which is concerned with investigating and challenging the disciplinary boundaries between the study and practice of literature and that of science. They also tackle one of the most important issues in Literature and Science: how the classroom and the education reinforce these boundaries, often referred to colloquially as the “Two Cultures,’ after the title of C. P. Snow’s (in)famous Rede Lecture in 1959.
Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Rachel Crossland (@DrRCrossland, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chichester, whose book, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, was published in 2018 by the Oxford University Press. In addition to discussing the obstacles to the study of Literature and Science at university in the UK, Rachel also explores the personal connections that underpin the #litsci aspects of her research and teaching.
At the end of the episode, you can hear Rachel read Rebecca Elson’s poem, ‘Explaining Relativity.’
For further reading, Laura and Catherine recommend:
Crossland, Rachel. Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Oxford University Press. 2018.
Elson, Rebecca. A Responsibility to Awe. Carcanet Press. 2001.
Hayles, N. Katherine. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. Cornell University Press. 1984.
Sleigh, Charlotte. Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan. 2011.
Whitworth, Michael. Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford University Press. 2001.
About the hosts:
Laura’s research investigates the connections between technology, gender, politics, and aesthetics in the city in late-Victorian, Edwardian, and Modernist literature. Her current project, Reading London’s Lightscapes, 1880–1950, considers literary and cultural responses to the electrification of London at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Laura has worked as an educator at handful of museums and nature centres across Canada as well as at undergraduate and graduate level in Canada and the UK.
Catherine’s research interests lie in poetic form, how experimental/cognitive psychology can be read productively alongside literature and all things memory-related. She’s writing a book on memory in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, and has also published on memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction. More recently, Catherine’s been looking at how literary and scientific knowledge proliferated alike in the nineteenth century, and is researching mutual improvement and literary societies in nineteenth-century Wales. A former schoolteacher, she has a particular interest in questions concerning education.
We would love to hear what you think about our first episode, so if you have feedback, please email us at litscipod@gmail.com
Feb 22, 201931:58