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.

Call for Papers: Perspective as Practice

An international conference on the circulation of optical knowledge in and outside the workshop - October 12-13, 2012, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

Organizers: Sven Dupré, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin & Jeanne Peiffer, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris

We invite proposals from scholars in the history of science and technology, the history of art, technical art history and conservation science and other related disciplines for an international conference on the production and circulation of optical knowledge in workshop and design practices of the visual and decorative arts and (garden) architecture between the fourteenth and seventeenth century.

This conference addresses both the practical optical knowledge produced in the context of artists’ workshops and artists’ appropriation and use of the science of optics (perspectiva), which included questions of psychology, physiology, anatomy, physics, and mathematics, for the production of art and architecture, including gardens. We welcome, in particular, papers which discuss the material practices of artists (as diverse as gardeners and goldsmiths) in imitating and representing the effects of light, creating the illusion of space and the shaping of landscape (from the use of paper and other instruments, also on real sites, to experimentation with the optical qualities of pigments and binding media). Equally welcome are papers which throw light on artists’ reading of texts on optics and their possible use in the context of the workshop.

We see this conference as a correction to the ways in which Erwin Panofsky’s "Perspective as Symbolic Form" – written more than 80 years ago – has shaped the historiography of perspective up until the present day, despite more recent important interventions by a.o. James Elkins and Hans Belting). Therefore, instead of seeking connections with worldviews and philosophies of space, this conference takes into account the polysemy of perspective associated with the practice of perspective. The conference will bring out the variety of uses and different meanings of perspectiva – during the period between 1300 and 1700 and across different sites of artists’ appropriations of optical knowledge. By situating artists’ optical knowledge in workshop and design practices, we anticipate that the conference papers will be attentive to a variety of constructions that create the illusion of space, and pay as much attention to other types of optical knowledge as to the geometry of perspective. We especially welcome innovative approaches to the study of the circulation of optical knowledge within the artist’s workshop.

Invited speakers:
Marjolijn Bol (Utrecht), Filippo Camerota (Florence), Georges Farhat (Toronto), Francesca Fiorani (Virginia), Elaheh Kheirandish (Harvard), Dominique Raynaud (Grenoble), Pietro Roccasecca (Rome)

Submission guidelines:
Deadline for proposals: March 15, 2012

Please submit a 300-words abstract as e-mail attachment along with your name, institutional affiliation and email address to officedupre@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de.

Please indicate in the subject line of your message: submission optics workshop.

Sekretariat Dupré
Max Planck Research Group
Art and Knowledge in Premodern Europe
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Boltzmannstraße 22
14195 BERLIN

officedupre@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

Virgil and Renaissance Culture / Virgilio e la cultura del Rinascimento

A two-day international conference to be held at the Accademia Nazionale

Virgiliana di Scienze Lettere e Arti, Mantua, Italy, 15-16 October 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS

Virgil and Renaissance Culture / Virgilio e la cultura del Rinascimento
[Website:http://virgil2012.wordpress.com/]

Organisers: Luke Houghton (University of Glasgow), Marco Sgarbi
(University of Verona)

Confirmed keynote speakers: Craig Kallendorf (Texas A&M University) and
Peter Mack (The Warburg Institute)

Et quis, io, iuvenes, tanti miracula lustrans eloquii, non se immensos
terraeque marisque prospectare putet tractus?

(Angelo Poliziano, Manto 351-3)

For scholars and intellectuals of the Renaissance, the poetry of Virgil
was not merely a pervasive presence in their world; it was in many
respects an embodiment of that world. In addition to the traditional
status enjoyed by the Aeneid as a 'mirror for princes', a guide to
virtuous and reprehensible conduct, and a repository of spiritual and
allegorical wisdom, poets and rhetoricians, artists and composers,
philosophers and theologians, political theorists and educators all sought
and found in Virgil's works models of good practice and expert instruction
in their respective fields. The poet's sway over Renaissance thought and
imagination was by no means confined to the library: throughout the
courts, the palaces and the public buildings of Europe, the rich
mythological apparatus of the Aeneid was harnessed to convey imperial and
dynastic claims, to assert proud traditions of civic liberty, and to
associate rulers and their subjects with particular social, moral and
ethical values, as well as to advertise the learning, taste and culture of
individual patrons.

In literate society, Virgil was everywhere; but the extent of his
influence reached far beyond the wide circle of his readers, through the
appearance of scenes and motifs from his poems - and sometimes also the
figure of the poet himself - in frescoes, sculpture and woodcuts, and even
on objects for domestic use and display. Contact with Virgil and his texts
took many forms and was shaped by a variety of external factors, in
addition to being filtered through countless previous literary and
artistic adaptations, a long tradition of critical and pedagogical
engagements, and strident expressions of both devotion and censure from
different quarters during the centuries between the poet's own day and the
age of the humanists. Among these successive interventions, a place of
particular honour is occupied by Dante, whose choice of 'the sea of all
knowledge' as his guide and master through the caverns of the Inferno and
along the slopes of Purgatory was to have a lasting impact on perceptions
of Virgil, not only as a literary character and aesthetic model but also
as a poet and historical figure.

Proposals are invited for papers in English or Italian, of no more than 30
minutes' duration, on any aspect of the place of Virgil in Renaissance
culture, in any medium. Abstracts should not be longer than 500 words, and
should include the author's name, institutional affiliation (if
applicable), and current e-mail address.

Proposals should be sent to one of the conference organisers, Marco Sgarbi
(marco.sgarbi@univr.it) or Luke Houghton (luke.houghton@glasgow.ac.uk),
before 31 December 2011. It is hoped that papers from this event will in
due course form a substantial publication.

Virgil and Renaissance Culture
A two-day international conference on Virgil and Renaissance Culture. For scholars and intellectuals of the Renaissance, the poetry of Virgil was not merely a pervasive presence in their world; it was in many respects an embodiment of that world.
When: 10th October 2012
Where: Accademia Nazionale, Virgiliana di Scienze Lettere e Arti, Mantua, Italy
Category: Conference

The Role of the Royal Society in the Battle over Mendelism

1:00 pm – 2:00 pm on Friday 05 October 2012
at The Royal Society, London

History of science lecture given by Professor Gregory Radick.

Event details:
Gregory Radick is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds.

The early years of the twentieth century saw one of the most ferocious controversies in the whole history of biology, over Gregor Mendel's experiments in pea hybridization and their significance for the scientific study of inheritance. On one side, the "Mendelians" were led by William Bateson FRS. On the other side, the opposed "biometricians" were led by W. F. R. Weldon FRS. Both men took inspiration from the work of Francis Galton FRS. In this talk I want to take seriously the 'FRSness' of these three famous scientists in order to throw light on the Mendelian-biometrician debate but also on the functioning of the Royal Society as a scientific institution at the turn of the century. I shall emphasise three organizational and ordering roles for the Society in particular, in relation to communications, committees and commendations.

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.