Wellcome Collection: “Finding Lost Science in Early Modern Poetry”

Wellcome Collection, 22 November.

We are hosting an afternoon workshop here at Wellcome Collection on ‘Finding Lost Science in Early Modern Poetry’. The workshop is free to attend and open to all. We would be delighted to see you there! To register, please contact Prof. Gesine Manuwald: g.manuwald@ucl.ac.uk

The workshop will be followed by a public event with viewings of early printed books, forming part of the Being Human festival: https://beinghumanfestival.org/event/finding-lost-science-in-early-modern-poetry/

Didactic poetry of the early modern period can reveal fascinating insights about what people of the time thought about science and how they expressed these ideas in poetic form. Texts of this literary genre, however, tend to be neglected because they are regarded neither as ‘proper scientific texts’ nor as ‘proper poetry’. This workshop, organised by the Society for Neo-Latin Studies, Wellcome Collection and the Department of Greek & Latin at University College London, aims to bring this type of literature into focus again. Specialists from a range of disciplinary backgrounds will present case studies, looking at a variety of English and Latin texts, and there will be plenty of opportunity for discussion. The day will conclude with a public event as part of the Being Human festival.

Programme

12.45–1.00 pm: Registration

1.00–1.15 pm: Welcome and introduction

1.15–2.00 pm: Claire Preston (Queen Mary University of London), ‘The gallery, the eye, and the rhetoric of observation in some 17th-century descriptions’

2.00–2.45 pm: David McOmish (University of Glasgow), ‘Teaching the Scientific Revolution in verse: when poetry ruled the cosmos’

2.45–3.15 pm: Coffee/tea

3.15–4.00 pm: Victoria Moul (King’s College London), ‘Latin poetry and medicine’

4.00–4.15 pm: Closing discussion

4.30–6.00 pm: Public event as part of the Being Human festival

Location: Wellcome Library, Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE.

The workshop and public event are free to attend. To register to attend the workshop, contact Gesine Manuwald. No registration is needed to attend the public event.

Wellcome Collection
183 Euston Road
London NW1 2BE, UK

Beyond the PhD: Post-Doctoral Opportunities and Early Career Development for Neo-Latinists

The Society for Neo-Latin Studies is organising a FREE EVENT aimed at researchers with interests in Neo-Latin at the postdoctoral and early-career level, to be held on the 9th September 2016 at King’s College London (Strand Campus). A full schedule for the event is given below, and will include a sponsored lunch and coffee breaks. Each session will include brief presentations on the schemes and opportunities under discussion, with particular consideration of the perspective of neo-Latin researchers. All presenters will have personal experience either of successful applications for, or of assessment of applications for the schemes or positions under discussion.

To sign up for the event please fill in the questionnaire at the following link by the 15th August 2016.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/CKXCLC3

The event is open to all who are interested, but should it be over-subscribed, priority will be given to those working wholly or partly on or with neo-Latin material, and who are either PhD students in the final 18 months of their program or post-doctoral researchers within three years of completing their PhD.

Program

10am – Arrival

10.30-11.30 – Introduction and presentation of Junior Research Fellowships and European opportunities. (Victoria Moul and William Barton)

11.30-12.00 – Coffee

12.00-1.00 – Presentation of Leverhulme and British Academy post-docs; and of post-docs attached to specific projects. (Lucy Jackson, Elizabeth Sandis and David McOmish)

1.00-2.00 – Lunch

2.-3.00 - Teaching fellowships, temporary and permanent lectureships, and careers in school-teaching.  (Bobby Xinyue, Ingrid De Smet, John Roberts)

3.00-3.30 – Tea

3.30-5.00pm - Strategies for career development: balancing teaching and research; where and when to publish; REF/TEF; preparing a book proposal; other career options etc. (Victoria Moul, William Barton, Gesine Manuwald)

5.00 onwards - Drinks/dinner at a local venue on a voluntary basis


For any queries not covered by the on-line survey, please contact the organisers at victoria.moul@kcl.ac.uk or william.barton@neolatin.lbg.ac.at.

Society for Neo-Latin Studies, Annual Lecture

November 28th 5 p.m.

‘Warwick in London’ premises, The Shard (32 London Bridge St, London SE1 9SG)

Dr Catarina Fouto (KCL)
‘Horace, Prudentius and Buchanan in Jacobus Tevius’s Epodon libri tres (1565): Classical and Christian Letters in Counter-Reformation Portugal’

Diogo de Teive (Jacobus Tevius) is often remembered as Buchanan’s friend and companion in misfortune when he was convicted in 1551 at the hands of the Portuguese Inquisition. However, after his conviction Teive went on to become one of the most successful Portuguese court poets of his time, boasting the patronage of Cardinal Henrique, the regent and Portuguese General Inquisitor.

While the expurgated reading of Horace’s Epodon and the deliberate imitation of Prudentius’s Peristephanon in Teive’s Epodon libri tres are in tune with the orthodoxy which prevailed at that time at the Portuguese court, there are also subtle examples of ambiguity towards it in this work. In Book II, which contains hymns to patron saints of Portugal, Teive celebrates the work of Prudentius and George Buchanan, establishing a genealogy of literary prestige which effaces the religious divide between Protestantism and Catholicism.

Due to security policy at The Shard, all visitors need to sign in: please contact Dr. Andrew Taylor (awt24@cam.ac.uk) before November 20th if you would like to attend the lecture.

Society for Neo-Latin Studies - Graduate Student Forum

King’s College London, Strand Building S8.08
Friday 16th May 2014, 1-6.30pm

We are organizing a graduate student forum to be held at King’s for graduate students working on or with neo-Latin material. The event is open to students in any discipline and at all stages, including MA/MPhil/MSt students and undergraduates considering graduate work in the field as well as PhD students. The event is scheduled for a Friday afternoon to allow those not based in London to make a weekend of it if they wish. KCL’s Strand campus is extremely central and easily accessible by tube from all the mainline terminals.

Graduate students in neo-Latin studies are unusually isolated: the UK has no departments of neo-Latin, so students are scattered among many departments across the country, including history, English, classics, modern languages, history of science, philosophy and theology. They are often the only student in their department (or even institution) working on a neo-Latin topic. There is a strong need for such students to meet each other, share their research and consult with more senior academics, who are themselves hard to locate and contact for the same reasons – they are scattered among many departments, and almost none of them will have ‘neo-Latin’ in their job title. As a result, strategies for career planning and job applications are particularly challenging for these students. This forum will offer the opportunity to speak pragmatically about such challenges and to discuss career development with staff and students at all stages.

The aim of the forum is to combine brief presentations by five or six students (limited to 10-15 minutes to allow even students at an early stage, for instance an MA dissertation, to present) with a session of presentations by four established academics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and career stages to advise on career development in the field.

There will be a small registration fee of £10 (payable in cash on arrival) to cover a sandwich lunch, coffee in the afternoon and drinks at the end of the event. We are applying for funds to allow us to offer some graduate bursaries to cover this fee and travel expenses. The event is generously supported by the Institute of Classical Studies.

If you would like to attend, please book a place by emailing Victoria Moul (victoria.moul@kcl.ac.uk) by the 1st of May 2014.Please indicate your institution, research area and the stage you are at (e.g. first year PhD; prospective MA student). If you would like to be considered for a bursary, should funds be available, please indicate this. (Priority would be given to those traveling the greatest distances.)

If you are interested in presenting a short paper on a neo-Latin element of your research please also contact Victoria, with a brief outline of the possible topic. Exploratory papers on ongoing research, or discussions of a particular problem are very welcome: you don’t have to be sure of your conclusions.


Programme

1.00-2.00: Arrival, registration, sandwich lunch in S8.08. Chance for introductions and informal networking.

2.00-4.15: series of short (10-15 minute) papers by five or six graduate students on their research.  Followed by questions and discussion.

4.15-4.45: coffee break

4.45-6.00: 'Careers in Neo-Latin' session, four presentations by neo-Latin scholars at various career stages and from various disciplinary backgrounds: Dr Paul Botley (Warwick, holder of Leverhulme funding for a Neo-Latin project); Dr Emma Buckley (Classics department, St Andrew’s); Dr Andrew Taylor (Cambridge, MML/English); Professor Brenda Hosington (Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, Warwick).

6.00 onwards: Drinks in situ. There will be a dinner afterwards at a local restaurant of an appropriate grad-student-friendly budget for anyone who'd like to come along.