I’m looking forward to some great meetings in 2013. This spring and summer will be especially eventful because I’m in London. I’m teaching at FSU’s London Study Centre in Bloomsbury (99 Great Russell Street) and working in the libraries and archives once the semester is finished.
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I’m giving a talk in February as a scheduled speaker in the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies. I’m excited about being able to meet some of the scholars involved at Birkbeck, which produces a lot of good work in the field. I enjoy their online journal, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century:
http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19
Here’s the information about the talk:
“Microscopic Writing and the Creation of Wonder.” Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of London, 11 February 2013, 6 pm. Keynes Library (Room 114, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD).
The practice of reading microscopic (tiny) writing, traditionally Biblical, reconnected the instrument to natural theology, as a window into the divine. But William Peters’ microscopic writing machine, displayed at the 1851 Great Exhibition, miniaturizes mundane texts like a roster of the Quekett Microscopical Society. Victorians secularize microscopic writing, redirecting it toward a wonder in the instrument itself, the ingenuity of the inscribing machine, and the viewing mind.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events
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I’ll be traveling to Wales (Cardiff) for the first time for the BSLS (British Society for Literature and Science) conference, April 11-13. My talk there is
More than a handmaiden: “literature and science” as interdisciplinary intervention.
The field of “literature and science,” a tremendously exciting one these days, is sometimes held up as an example of the kind of interdisciplinary work that can make humanistic study more relevant in an age when states like Florida propose programs that would actively discourage students from choosing humanities degrees. This paper will examine the possibilities and pitfalls of this approach; I suggest that transdisciplinary study in the mode espoused by Jay Clayton offers a more thoughtful and productive model for defending the value of humanities research in the twenty-first century.
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I’m also looking forward to exploring Venice this June 3-6 (2013), when I attend a conference of NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA.
That’s a supernumerary conference of three societies of Victorianist scholars: the North American Victorian Studies Association, the British Association of Victorian Studies, and the Australian Victorian Studies Association. The conference theme is “Glocal (e.g. global/local) Victorians” and my talk is
‘Worlds within worlds’: Nationalist and Imperialist Discourses in 19th-Century Anglophone Microscopy.
Nineteenth-century scientists spent a lot of time ensuring that their methods and results could translate across borders, but science was also a competitive enterprise. This is acutely noticeable in microscopy, perhaps because the field of vision is often considered a “world” available for “colonization.” I’ll be discussing how authors of microscopy texts used rhetoric that evokes science as both a global (cooperative) project and an imperial (competitive) one.
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During June 19-21, I’m attending the “Narrative Future for Health Care” conference at Kings College London, the official launch for the new International Network of Narrative Medicine. I found out about this one after the paper deadline, so I can relax and enjoy listening to the talks. It looks like it will be a great conference!
Then, on July 1st, I’ve been asked to give a talk on the British case history, which will be called ”Let me die in your house: Writing cardiac medicine in the Victorian era,” at the Centre for the Humanities and Health at Kings College London. I’ll be talking about the uses of sentiment in the case history. This is for a workshop titled Medical Case Histories as Genre, and I’m really looking forward to hearing the other speakers.
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Briefly looking ahead to next fall, I plan to present work at the BAVS conference at Royal Holloway on “Victorian Numbers” (28-31 August) and at NAVSA in Pasadena (23-27 October), which is on “Evidence.”
