SLSAeu - European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts

07/10/2024

CfP - deadline: 31 March 2025:
Literature and Science in the Public Sphere

The journal Public Humanities invites submissions for the upcoming themed Issue Literature and Science in the Public Sphere, which will be Guest Edited by John Holmes, Jenni G Halpin, and Aura Heydenreich (President SLSAeu). The deadline for submissions is 31 March 2025.

Further details:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-humanities/announcements/call-for-papers/literature-and-science-in-the-public-sphere

02/10/2024

BERLIN SCIENCE WEEK - mainly in German.

Between 1 - 10 November Berlin Science Week presents over 200 events, bringing together people from science, the arts, and society at large.

25/07/2024

Please Save The Date for SLSAeu 2025 and spread the word:

4–6 June 2025
The Great Hall, King’s College London

The Lifespan: Perspectives on Ageing and the Life Course from the Medical Humanities, the Health Sciences and Age Studies
Conference of SLSAeu

Organisers:
Dr Aura Heydenreich (President SLSAeu)
Dr Martina Zimmermann (SAACY Programme)
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/saacy

Ageing is too often seen as an inevitable period of decline at the end of our lives. The UKRI-funded research programme The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY), based at the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London, looks at how we can overcome this cultural pessimism by understanding ageing as a lifelong process of change. SAACY explores how we talk and think about ageing in scientific research, medical practice and wider culture, and how the way we do so can affect our experiences of ageing, the meaning we assign to growing older, and the decisions we make about older people.

This three-day conference will be held at King’s College London. We hope to provide limited hybrid options with a strong preference for papers to be presented in person. We are keen to foster conversations across disciplines within individual panels, encouraging contributions on lifespan/lifecourse approaches to ageing from disciplines such as Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Dementia Studies, Disability Studies, Epidemiology, Evolutionary Science and Medicine, Gender Studies, Geriatrics, Gerontology, Health Economics, Languages and Literatures, Narrative Medicine, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Postgenomic Sciences, Psychiatry, and Public Health.

The Call for Papers and further information on fees and bursaries will be circulated soon.

Confirmed plenary speakers and round table discussants include:

Sally Chivers, Trent University, Canada
Ulrike Draesner, Leipzig University, Germany
Des O’Neill, Trinity College Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Susan Pickard, University of Liverpool, UK
Oliver Robinson, Imperial College London, UK
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Columbia University, USA

16/05/2024

BioCriticism webinar, 24th of May 2024, 2 pm CET
(zoom link below)

“Books of Life in the Age of the Genome”
Speaker: Dr. Paul Hamann-Rose (University of Passau)

Respondent: Dr. Rūta Šlapkauskaitė (Vilnius University)

Abstract:
Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the novel increasingly enters into dialogue with genetic discourses of life, examining their foundational assumptions as well as potential consequences for individuals and socio-political communities. The novel does not simply embrace the new genetic propositions but appropriates and critically examines them. Central concerns that have shaped the novel’s traditional representation of life expand to include a newly genetic perspective. In the age of the genome, I argue, the novel emerges as a genetic ‘book of life’. To demonstrate the theoretical, aesthetic and political consequences of this development, I turn to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. The trilogy’s ambitious imaginative treatment of genetic discourses and technologies exemplifies an important ecological exploration of genetic science today, which underlines the critical potential of the novel to contribute to cultural and socio-political debates about future life on the planet.

Bionote speaker:
Paul Hamann-Rose is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Passau, Germany. He studied at the University of London Institute in Paris and at the University of Hamburg, where he received his PhD. His two principle areas of research are the legal and cultural construction of authorship across the new media landscapes of British Romanticism, and the interrelations between literature and genetic science. For the last couple of years, he has been a member of the GetPreCiSe research project on genetic privacy at Vanderbilt University. He has published widely on cultural representations of genetic science in contexts from postcolonialism to privacy and bioethics. His book Genetics and the Novel: Reimagining Life Through Fiction has just been published with the Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine series.

Bionote respondent:
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė is an Associate Professor of English literature at Vilnius University, Lithuania. Her research interests include Canadian and Australian literature, neo-Victorianism, and environmental humanities. She has collaborated with colleagues from Sweden and Estonia in a Nordplus project on Canadian Studies and is currently participating in the EU Horizon projectMotherNet, which marshals cross-disciplinary perspectives on the material and discursive practices of motherhood. Among her recent ecocritical publications are articles on Canadian authors Fred Stenson and Ed O’Loughlin, and Caribbean writer David Dabydeen. Rūta is currently researching the conceptual relevance of genre in narrating the climate emergency in contemporary Anglophone literatures.

Organizer:
Liliane Campos
Maître de conférences en études anglophones et théâtrales
Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies
Sorbonne Nouvelle / Institut universitaire de France

Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82747277584?pwd=TjUwdUhYb2ZDbloxQmFPYUgwRFEydz09
Meeting ID: 827 4727 7584
Passcode: 329900

20/04/2024

BioCriticism webinar, 26/04, 2 pm CET
“The Biomolecularisation of the Archive”
Speaker: Prof. Jerome de Groot (University of Manchester)

Respondent: Prof. François-Joseph Lapointe (Université de Montréal)

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83685396506?pwd=ejZlcThMZGVKNXkyRHZXSkt1T0dCQT09

Meeting ID: 836 8539 6506
Passcode: 602541

Abstract: New genetic approaches to the material of the archive have wide implications for our conception of the past, our understanding of memory, and our broader sense of what historical information even is. Whilst historical data has regularly been developed and challenged, and historians use a breadth of information, my contention is that the accelerated development of huge datasets that are beyond the reach of ‘historians’ has the potential to transform the discipline. Set within (whilst also driving) a wider biomolecular turn in society, as cultural understanding of the past becomes genetically-informed, this change in the historical approach suggests a shift towards what I call ‘double helix history’.

Professor Jerome de Groot teaches at the University of Manchester. He is the author most recently of Double Helix History which looks at DNA and the past. He is currently working on new projects about FutureArchives and Biomolecular Humanities.

Professor François-Joseph Lapointe is a biologist and bioartist (Université de Montréal). As part of his research in biology, he is interested in phylogenetics, systematics, population genetics, and the human microbiome. As part of his interdisciplinary artistic practice, he draws inspiration from models of molecular biology and genetics.

01/05/2023

We are looking foward to welcoming you in Erlangen soon!
You can find the preliminary programme on the conference page:
https://www.slsaeu23.fau.de

16/12/2022

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, edited by the Critical Posthumanism Network, with lots of articles on topics at the intersections of science, literature and the arts, on interdisciplinary fields such as the Digital Humanities, The Environmental Humanities, Disability Studies, the Blue Humanities, the Energy Humanities, Animal Studies, Plant Studies, Anthropology, Geography etc.
Out in print now (in two volumes) but unaffordable for individuals.
A big THANK YOU to all the contributors!
If your library holds a subscription, the PDF of each article can be downloaded at:
https://link.springer.com/refer.../10.1007/978-3-030-42681-1

09/10/2022

SAVE THE DATE: CfP coming soon! See: slsa-eu.org
The next meeting of the SLSAeu will take place in Erlangen, Germany, from 18-21 May.
Theme: Models, Metaphors and Simulations: Epistemic Transformations in Literature, Science and the Arts
Confirmed speakers:
Amy Kind, Claremont McKenna College, California
Roman F***g, London School of Economics, London
Jean Marie Schaeffer, École des Hautes Études et Sciences Sociales Paris

09/04/2022

Chapters on Critical Posthumanism, !
Online First in the Living Reference on SpringerLink of the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, edited by S. Herbrechter, I. Callus, M. Rossini, M. Grech, M. de Bruin-Molé, C. J. Müller:

This handbook surveys and speculates on the ways in which the posthumanist paradigm emerged, transformed, and might further develop across the humanities.

15/01/2022

Sunday, 16 January:
Invitation to an online talk/conversation with Bruce Clarke on:
Cybernetics and the Gaia Hypothesis

January 16, 2021 | 9:00 PDT, 12:00 EDT, 18:00 CEST

FREE REGISTRATION at
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cybernetics-and-the-gaia-hypothesis-a-conversation-with-bruce-clarke-tickets-233389894457?aff=ascmembers

In this talk, literature and science scholar Bruce Clarke will draw from the scientific writings of Lovelock and Margulis as well as from his forthcoming edition of their correspondence to document and discuss their cultivation of the Gaia hypothesis as a dedicated application of cybernetic systems thinking.

Participants Bios

Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. His research focuses on systems theory, narrative theory, and Gaia theory. His latest book is Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2020); other books include Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minnesota 2014), Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (Fordham 2008), and Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Michigan 2001). He was Baruch S. Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress in 2019. Co-edited with Sébastien Dutreil, his edition of Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Michael Hohl is a designer, educator and researcher. As a Professor of Design Theory at Anhalt University of Applied Sciences Dessau, Germany, he likes making things, thinking about things, how we do them and how this changes us. He enjoys learning with BA, MA and PhD students, from first-year BAs to supervising and mentoring PhD research students from Art, Design and Architecture. He also conducts Research Training Seminars at the Royal College of Art London and other institutions. He organises and co-organises conferences, research seminars and guest lectures, co-edits publications and conferences – and is interested in turning these experiences into conversations.

Bruce Clarke discusses the cybernetics of the Gaia hypothesis developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.