Spooks and spoofs: psychologists and psychical research in the inter-war years

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm on Friday 26 October 2012
at The Royal Society, London

History of science lecture by Professor Elizabeth Valentine.

Event details:
Elizabeth Valentine is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Several physicist fellows of the Royal Society were interested in psychical research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between the wars, William McDougall FRS and other senior academic psychologists became involved with amateur psychical researcher and author Harry Price. They attended séances at his laboratory and were members of his University of London Council for Psychical Investigation. Why did reputable psychologists and the University of London cooperate with someone of dubious integrity who lacked scientific credentials? One reason for their mutual attraction may have been their common engagement in a delicate balancing act between courting popular appeal and asserting scientific expertise and authority.

Attending this event:
This event is free to attend and open to all. No tickets are required. Doors open at 12:30pm and seats will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

Recorded audio will be available on this page a few days afterwards.

Enquiries: Contact the events team.

The Zoological World of Edward Lear

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm on Friday 19 October 2012
at The Royal Society, London

History of science lecture by Dr Clemency Fisher.

Event details:
Clemency Fisher is Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at National Museums Liverpool.

Edward Lear is most famous for his Nonsense Rhymes, such as “The Owl and the Pussycat” and “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat”, but he was also a talented zoological artist and described several new species of birds. As part of the celebrations for the bicentenary of Lear’s birth in 1812, Dr Fisher will explore Lear’s time working as an artist and tutor for the 13th Earl of Derby’s family at Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool. Lear used some of the birds and mammals in Lord Derby’s aviary and menagerie as models for his paintings and many of these individuals are now in the collections of National Museums Liverpool. Several are the types on which new species were based. A current project, shared by NML and the Western Australian Museum, is the unravelling of a knotty problem with the nomenclature of Baudin’s Cockatoo, which Lear described in 1832.

Attending this event:
This event is free to attend and open to all. No tickets are required. Doors open at 12:30pm and seats will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

Recorded audio will be available on this page a few days afterwards.

Enquiries: Contact the events team.

Alan Turing: Not Just a Beautiful Mind

6:30 pm – 7:30 pm on Wednesday 17 October 2012
at The Royal Society, London

History of science lecture given by Dr Andrew Hodges.

Event details:
Andrew Hodges is a Tutorial Fellow in Mathematics at Wadham College, Oxford.

When Alan Turing was elected to the Royal Society in 1951, the citation was for his definition of the theory of computability in 1936, achieved when he was only 24. But he was not only a theorist. Few people then, or later, appreciated how much effort he had devoted to turning his 1936 'universal machine' into the practical electronic computer. One reason for this was that the crucial link lay within his central role in Bletchley Park codebreaking, long kept completely secret. This talk will introduce Alan Turing as someone who combined a wide range of mathematical advances with far-sighted application, entirely true to the foundation of the Royal Society, but a rarity in the modern world of highly specialised expertise.

Attending this event:
This event is free to attend and open to all. No tickets are required. Doors open at 6pm and seats will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

Enquiries: Contact the events team.

Transforming Early Modern Identities

Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group,
The City University of New York Graduate Center,
Friday 12th October

London Shakespeare Centre and the Arts and Humanities Festival,
King’s College London,
Saturday 27th October

To register for the London day of this conference, and to view a draft programme, please follow this link:http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/eventrecords/temi.aspx

To register for the New York day of this conference, and to view a draft programme, please follow this link:http://opencuny.org/transformingidentities/new-york-program/

This conference, hosted over two days in two cities, has a double focus. ‘Transforming Early Modern Identities’ will examine both how the concept of the early modern self is being transformed by recent scholarly works exploring early modern literature and culture, and also how the process of transformation itself was foundational to the ways in which early modern subject positions were negotiated. In the twenty-first century, we remain fascinated with notions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century subjectivity. Whilst past conferences have focused on exploring specific strata of early modern selfhood – in terms of gender, sexuality, race or class – this conference will examine both the ways in which scholarly considerations of the early modern subject have changed in recent years, and also how times of transformation work to shape early modern identities.

Thus, the aims of this conference are twofold: to understand the ways in which early modern scholarship (historical and literary) has transformed our notion of early modern subjectivity in recent years; and to examine the ways in which transformation itself – and the in between times of selfhood it implies – played an important part in defining various early modern subject positions. How has the way scholars examine the early modern self changed in the last twenty years? How reliant are early modern individuals on moments of transformation?

The Notorious Sir John Hill: Georgian Celebrity Science and Attacks on the Royal Society

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm on Friday 12 October 2012 at The Royal Society, London

History of science lecture by Professor George Rousseau.

Event details:
George Rousseau is a Professor of History at the University of Oxford.

No man in Georgian England ever attacked the Royal Society more savagely than Sir John Hill (1714-1775), and no one in his era was more notorious for public scandal. This talk sketches Hill's multi-faceted life and assesses his attacks on the Royal Society and the changes they effected. George Rousseau's biography, the first ever written of this curious figure, has just appeared in America and will be on display during the lecture.

Attending this event:
This event is free to attend and open to all. No tickets are required. Doors open at 12:30pm and seats will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

Recorded audio will be available on this page a few days afterwards.

Enquiries: Contact the events team.