Fellowships in the History of Science, Technology, Medicine, & Industry (Philadelphia)

Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry 2014–2015 

Fellowships in the History of Science, Technology, Medicine, & Industry

The Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF), an independent research library in Philadelphia, PA, invites applications for short-term and long-term fellowships in the history of science, medicine, technology, and industry.

Short-term fellows are particularly meant to use the collections, while long-term fellows' work must help to support the mission of the institution and fit with collections more generally. The research collections at CHF range chronologically from the fifteenth century to the present and include 6,000 rare books, significant archival holdings, thousands of images, and a large artifact and fine arts collection, supported by over 100,000 reference volumes and journals. Within the collections there are many areas of special strength, including: alchemy, mining & metallurgy, dyeing and bleaching, balneology, gunpowder and pyrotechnics, gas-lighting, books of secrets, inorganic and organic chemistry, biochemistry, food chemistry, and pharmaceuticals.

We support roughly 20 fellows each year, creating a vibrant international community of scholars whose work is in some way tied to the history of materials and materiality, chemistry, and all related sciences. Applications come from scholars in a wide range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. To see this year's list, go to:
http://www.chemheritage.org/research/beckman-center/fellows-and-staff.aspx.

Postdoctoral Fellowships (we encourage scholars with PhDs at all career levels to consider applying, including those looking for a place of residence during a sabbatical leave)
9 Months in Residence
open to PhD scholars • $45,000

Dissertation Fellowships
9 Months in Residence; open to graduate students at the dissertation stage • $26,000

Short-Term Fellowships
1–4 Months in Residence; open to all scholars and researchers • $3,000 per month

Application Deadline: February 15, 2014

For further information visit:
www.chemheritage.org/BeckmanCenter

AHRC Funded Doctoral Studentships, University of Roehampton

AHRC Funded Doctoral Studentships in the Arts and Humanities: Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Roehampton

The Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton is seeking exceptionally well-qualified candidates to apply for AHRC doctoral studentships, as part of the TECHNE consortium, led by Royal Holloway University of London.

We are particularly keen to hear from candidates interested in pursuing research in early modern literature, culture, drama, theatre or performance: applicants interested in any of these areas are strongly encouraged to contact the Department directly to discuss the application process and the potential research project.

The Department has a vigorous research culture and a supportive network of partner institutions, with expertise in the early modern period provided by Prof. Clare McManus, Dr. Andy Kesson and Dr. Jane Kingsley-Smith.

For more information, please see individual staff pages at
http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/english-and-creative-writing/staff/
and for more details on the TECHNE application process, see
http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/Courses/Graduate-School/TECHNE-AHRC-Doctoral-Training-Partnership/

The deadline for applications is 19 February 2014.

Second Annual Postgraduate Renaissance Symposium: Music and the Visual Arts

Event to take place: Saturday 18 January 2014, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

We are delighted to announce that our keynote address will be given by Professor Iain Fenlon (King’s College, Cambridge)

There was a strong relationship between music and the visual arts during the Renaissance. The function, meaning, audience and patronage of both strands of the arts were often extremely closely aligned. Music and the visual arts in the Renaissance paralleled one another in the creation (or dissolution) of national style, portrayed the same religious, mythological and secular sources in analogous institutional and private spaces, and drew inspiration from one another in engaging audiences of all types – sacred and secular, elite to illiterate.

The study (and experience) of music and art has occurred largely separately, however. Hence, the wariness of students of Renaissance art and music to explore the relationship between their own discipline and their close yet unfamiliar counterpart has resulted more in the appropriation rather than synthesis of diverse research skills. This symposium hopes to break down these historiographic boundaries and explore the numerous instances of interdisciplinarity that exist in Renaissance scholarship. We invite postgraduate and early career scholars of all disciplines to present instances of this relationship in their research, and to use this symposium as an opportunity for exploratory and open-minded discussion of aural and visual experience in Renaissance culture and historiography. We are particularly keen to encourage participants to consider ways of presenting interdisciplinary research in engaging and inventive ways.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• joint musical and commissions
• patronage
• devotional function
• the relationship of art and music to physical space
• audiences / congregations
• relationships between the senses and the arts
• commemorative art and music
• historiography (of interdisciplinary study)
• mnemonics
• curatorial, performative, and museological approaches to Renaissance culture
• contemporary or modern relationships in hermeneutic interpretation

The Renaissance Symposium offers the opportunity for research students at all levels from universities in the UK and abroad to present their research and receive feedback in a friendly and constructive environment. We cannot offer travel subsidies for speakers, and therefore students from outside London are encouraged to apply to their institutions for funding to attend the symposium.

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words and your academic CV by 4 November 2013 to renaissanceartandmusic@gmail.com

Organised by Harriette Peel (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Matthew Laube (Royal Holloway), & Katie Bank (Royal Holloway)

CALL FOR PAPERS: Measure and Excess in 17th and 18th Century England and America

International conference hosted by SEAA XVII-XVIII

(Societie d'etudes Anglo-Americaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles)

Maison de la recherche de Paris 4
28, rue Serpente
75006 PARIS

17-18 January 2014

The idea of measure is inseparable from the idea of excess, since the one governs the other. Excess always exceeds a measure, that is to say a norm. According to Littre, excess is 'that which goes beyond ordinary limits, the mean.'

However, these terms are of course highly unstable; what is measure for some represents excess for others. The dialectics of measure and excess seems to be at the heart of preoccupations in the 17c and 18c in England as well as in the new world, whether concerning theoretical or practical issues.

Explorers set out to claim the world and make their fortunes, but also to measure its dimensions. Apart from the multiplication of instruments of measurement (charts, globes, and other maritime devices) the unit of measurement itself became a matter of state; one recalls that the queen confirmed the measurement of the English foot in 1588, which was reaffirmed in 1758. This desire to discipline the prodigality of nature characterizes the work of taxonomist John Ray, who classified innumerable animal and plant species by measuring them.

In politics, measure is to be understood as that which prevents or contains unrest. Largely influenced by ancient philosophy, early modern English philosophers regard[ed] measure as the touchstone of civil harmony as well as of personal wisdom, as opposed to the excesses of civil war and immoral behaviour. For Francis Bacon, the lesson to be drawn from the fall of Icarus in The Wisdom of the Ancients is that 'the path of virtue lies straight between excess on the one side, and defect on the other.'
The complex links which bond our ideas of measure and excess also inform theological debate, religious tension and sectarian persecution. To give one example, the Anglican faith, conceived by its founding fathers and lived out by its faithful as a middle way, finds itself rejected by the Puritans as excessively Catholic.

Whether in the arts or the humanities, measure and excess inform opposed aesthetic positions which only make sense through this very opposition. Cicero's rhetoric, featuring a measured style, rebukes two kinds of excess: the overblown Asiatic style on the one hand, and Attic dryness on the other. In architecture and music, measure—in a literal sense, as it creates spatial and temporal structures—can also run into excess. In verse, measure (that is to say, metre) contains the excesses of feeling, thus rendering them more striking; as John Donne reminds us ('For he tames grief, that fetters it in verse.') In painting, the term mensura may well refer to accurate proportions, but this does not stop many celebrated painters from evading constraint by invoking another system of proportions, more tolerant of excess. Baroque excess could only have arisen as a counter-movement to classical measure. Likewise, the lucidity so valued by English neo-classical writers (one thinks of John Dryden, and Alexander Pope who wrote: 'Between excess and famine lies a mean;/ Plain, but not sordid; though not splendid, clean' [Horace II, Satire 2]) was at least partly a reaction to the elaborate style from before the civil war, perceived as excessively obscure.

Papers will address the numerous links between measure and excess in the 17c and 18c in Britain and America, in the various fields of politics, theology, literature, architecture, painting, and music; but also in manners, where luxury lives alongside austerity; and not forgetting sciences such as geography, physics and astronomy.

Proposals, plus a selective bibliography and bio-bibliographical CV, may be simultaneously submitted to:

Guillaume COATALEN guillaumecoatalen@hotmail.com
Pierre DEGOTT pierre.degott@univ-lorraine.fr
Guyonne LEDUC guyonne.leduc@univ-lille3.fr

Deadline for abstract submission: 25 April 2013
Decision of the scientific committee: 30 June 2013

Centenary Lectures: Hugh Trevor-Roper 1914-2014

A series of papers and discussions to mark the centenary of his birth (on 15 January) and to appraise aspects of his thought and writing. The occasion is arranged by the Dacre Trust and will be held on

Saturday 11th January 2014 at Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Provisional Programme

10.00 - 11.35 SESSION 1: MID-SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY REVOLUTIONS

• Sir John Elliott, ‘Trevor-Roper and “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century”’
• Blair Worden, ‘The Unpublished Book: The Puritan Revolution’
• Mark Greengrass, ‘“Three Foreigners: The Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution”’

COFFEE

11.55 - 1.00 SESSION 2: ERASMIANISM AND ECUMENICALISM

• Peter N. Miller, ‘Trevor-Roper and the Erasmian Tradition’
• Noel Malcolm, ‘Another Unpublished Book: “The Ecumenical Movement and the Church of England, 1598-1618”’

BUFFET LUNCH IN CORPUS

2.00 - 3.55 SESSION 3: THE SECOND WORLD WAR

• Richard Overy, ‘The Last Days of Hitler’
• Sir Michael Howard, ‘Trevor-Roper and Wartime Intelligence’
• Eberhard Jäckel, ‘Trevor-Roper and Hitler’
• Gina Thomas, ‘Trevor-Roper and Himmler’s Masseur’

TEA

4.15 - 4.50 SESSION 4: THE PROSE

John Banville, ‘Trevor-Roper as Prose Stylist’

4.50 - 5.25 SESSION 5: CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

5.30 - 7.15 RECEPTION IN ORIEL COLLEGE OXFORD

To celebrate the centenary, and to mark the publication of ONE HUNDRED LETTERS FROM HUGH TREVOR-ROPER, a selection of his letters to a variety of correspondents written between 1943 and 2001. The book is edited by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman and will be published by Oxford University Press. All who have attended part or all of the conference will be welcome at the reception.

ARRANGEMENTS

The papers and discussions are open to all, and those who come to them are welcome to do so for either all or part of the proceedings.  There is no charge for attendance or for lunch or refreshments, but those wishing to attend will need to give notice.. Space is limited and places will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.(A final closing date in December for any remaining spaces will be announced nearer the time.)  Those wishing to attend should email Blair Worden, who will be happy to answer questions.

Please whether you will:

1. join the group for lunch

2. attend the reception

3. state which sessions you plan to attend

In the autumn of 2014 a series of Dacre Centenary Lectures will be held, in association with the Oxford History Faculty, in the Examination Schools, Oxford, on Fridays at 5 p.m., provisionally under the title ‘IDEAS AND SOCIETY c. 1600-1800’. 

The speakers will be Anthony Grafton, Michael Hunter, Jonathan Israel, Colin Kidd, Noel Malcolm, David Wormersley and Brian Young