30th April 2019
Neil Tarrant (University of York)
The Roman Index and Arnald of Villanova: The Rejection of Albert the Great’s Astrology
Christians contested the orthodoxy of astrological talismans between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The debate hinged on whether or not talismans could produce their effects naturally. These claims about the natural world were rarely tested empirically, however. Arguments for and against the orthodoxy of talismans depended on a philosopher or theologian’s ability to mobilise philosophical and theological opinions -- in effect, their ability to construct a convincing narrative – to defend their conception of the natural order, and by extension the orthodoxy of this set of magical practices. In this paper, I explore these issues by taking the example of the censorship of Arnald of Villanova’s works in sixteenth-century Italy.
Heike Hartung (University of Potsdam)
Longevity Narratives: From Life Span Optimism to Statistical Panic
In order to situate my talk historically, I will give a brief overview of the development of longevity discourse, beginning with the Enlightenment’s optimism to eventually overcome old age. Next, I will trace the emergence of statistics in the nineteenth century with its impact on the life course, developing concepts such as „life expectancy“ and the „life span“. Introducing a cultural comparative perspective, I will analyse two narrative case studies of longevity published in the early twentieth century, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall's Senescence (1922) and the British dramatist Bernard Shaw's play cycle Back to Methuselah (1921). The analysis illustrates that evolutionary and cultural perspectives on ageing and longevity are ambivalent and problematic, providing the ground for what Kathleen Woodward has termed „statistical panic“ (2009). In Hall’s and Shaw’s texts this is related to a crisis narrative of culture and civilization against which both writers place their specific solutions of individual and species longevity. Whereas Hall employs autobiographical accounts of artists as examples of longevity to strengthen his argument about wise old men as exclusive repositories of knowledge, Shaw in his vision of longevity as an extended form of midlife for both genders encounters the limits of age representation.
14th May 2019
Sally Horrocks and Paul Merchant
Scientists’ narratives in An Oral History of British Science
Sarah Dillon
“The Ineradicable Eliza Effect and Its Dangers”: Weizenbaum, Pygmalion and the Implications of Gendering AI
28th May 2019
Emily Hayes
Fashioned in the light of physics: the scope and methods of Halford Mackinder's geography
Dominic J. Berry
Biological engineering as genre
18th june 2019
Veronika Lipphardt
Ethnicizing isolation: How narratives guide genetic investigations of (vulnerable) human populations
Will Tattersdill
What if dinosaurs survived? Or, reading alternate natural history in science fiction and non-fiction of the late twentieth century