Verity Burke
I am an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of literary praxis, the environmental humanities, and museum studies. I currently hold the John Pollard Newman Fellowship in Climate Change and the Arts at University College Dublin, which investigates the representation of climate change in our heritage institutions.
The Irish Research Council funded my most recent project, 'Still Lives: Organic and Digital Animals in the Natural History Museum', which examines the dialogue between analogue and digital technologies of animal visualisation in their museum context. A second research project, investigated thanks to a Princeton Library Fellowship and funding from the British Association for Victorian Studies, with co-investigator Dr Anna Maria Barry, examines collections of nineteenth-century life and death masks.
Since 2017, I have worked as research associate on funded projects from the AHRC, SSHRC and NFR which bring attention to intermedial storytelling in the display cultures of our natural history museums into the contemporary period, including 'Building the Book of Nature: the Poetics of the Natural History Museum' (SSHRC, University of Birmingham), Narrativising Dinosaurs: Science and Popular Culture, 1850-Present (AHRC, University of Birmingham) and Beyond Dodos and Dinosaurs: Displaying Extinction and Recovery in Museums (NFR, Universitet i Stavanger). Other roles have included Research Officer to the Cole Collections at the University of Reading, and Engagement Fellow for the Linnean Society (funded by the British Society of the History of Science). Research interests have led to public engagement, for example curating #ColeEx, a Twitter exhibition of twentieth-century natural history drawn from the archival fonds of the Cole Museum of Zoology, UK, and 'Dinosaurs and Art', a Museum Late event at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
The Irish Research Council funded my most recent project, 'Still Lives: Organic and Digital Animals in the Natural History Museum', which examines the dialogue between analogue and digital technologies of animal visualisation in their museum context. A second research project, investigated thanks to a Princeton Library Fellowship and funding from the British Association for Victorian Studies, with co-investigator Dr Anna Maria Barry, examines collections of nineteenth-century life and death masks.
Since 2017, I have worked as research associate on funded projects from the AHRC, SSHRC and NFR which bring attention to intermedial storytelling in the display cultures of our natural history museums into the contemporary period, including 'Building the Book of Nature: the Poetics of the Natural History Museum' (SSHRC, University of Birmingham), Narrativising Dinosaurs: Science and Popular Culture, 1850-Present (AHRC, University of Birmingham) and Beyond Dodos and Dinosaurs: Displaying Extinction and Recovery in Museums (NFR, Universitet i Stavanger). Other roles have included Research Officer to the Cole Collections at the University of Reading, and Engagement Fellow for the Linnean Society (funded by the British Society of the History of Science). Research interests have led to public engagement, for example curating #ColeEx, a Twitter exhibition of twentieth-century natural history drawn from the archival fonds of the Cole Museum of Zoology, UK, and 'Dinosaurs and Art', a Museum Late event at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
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Publications by Verity Burke
with science fiction in museums, and outline the essays
that will, we hope, stimulate further critical discussion on this topic.
representations of natural and cultural history, it is widely accepted
that no display neutrally presents an objectively realized exterior
world. In this piece, we further that argument by drawing attention
to the narrative techniques implicit in staging extinct life, focussing
in particular on the similarity between museum display and the tropes
of fantasy worldbuilding. We present three short case studies in which
Mesozoic life is used in narratives that are straightforwardly at odds
with the scientific consensus: the Creation Museum in Kentucky, USA;
Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire in the UK; and the display contexts
of the dinosauroid, a speculative Stenonychosaurus model created by
the Canadian Dale Russell. Our aim is to demonstrate how museums
put genre and storytelling to counterfactual purposes. Museums, we
conclude, build worlds: worlds that are putatively similar to the one
we live in but can just as easily be fictitious. The fact/fantasy boundary
is almost always more porous than our shared impressions of museum
authenticity typically suggest.
editor who later became a lecturer in English literature at Princeton.
Today he is best remembered for leaving the University a remarkable
collection of life and death masks that he spent many years accumulating
and researching. This body of casts reveals a vital element of Hutton’s
collecting praxis: his belief that death was a critical (perhaps even the
critical) component of enduring celebrity. Death masks – a wax or
plaster cast taken posthumously from a person’s face – were executed
for a number of reasons: scientific, artistic, or intensely personal. In all
cases, though, there was a desire to preserve a hypothetically objective
likeness of an important person, marking a shift between the perceived
binary of life and death. While the death mask facilitated a sense of
proximity to the celebrity body, Hutton was driven to flesh these faces
out with an array of ephemera, including portraits, autographs,
photographs of graves, strands of hair, and even casts of their hands.
For Hutton, this triangulation figured as an attempt to capture a physical
closeness to the bodies of departed celebrities, an urge he articulated
explicitly in his unpublished writings. This article offers a new lens
through which to consider celebrity mementoes – as relics in which the ‘imprint’ of the individual is sought and as icons through which we
attempt to materialise celebrity.
Event Organiser by Verity Burke
Each session is hosted on Zoom to allow for international participation, and will take the format of short papers around a specific theme, followed by a synthesised Q&A and discussion.
We are at a crucial historical moment, in which the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List has announced a catastrophic decline in global biodiversity. Museums have an important role to play in communicating the value of nature. Yet nature is, necessarily, interpreted in museums, through taxidermy dioramas and skeletal mounts; virtual tours and digital databases; image, text and film. This event series brings together museum professionals and academics across disciplines to encourage vital conversations about the museum mediation of the natural world during the sixth mass extinction. Each session will be hosted on Zoom to allow for international participation, and will take the format of short papers around a specific theme, followed by a roundtable discussion.
Deadline for CFP: Friday 17th June 2016
Conference date: 24th September 2016
Location: Barts Pathology Museum, London
Keynote: Dr. Tara MacDonald (University of Idaho)
‘“Why can’t I look into your heart, and see what secrets it is keeping from me?”’
The protagonist of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), surgeon Ovid de Vere, laments the difficulty in deciphering hidden emotions and secrets. Yet, the language suggests his medical background, striking a note with the novel’s supposedly anti-vivisection message and highlighting contemporary debates into the nature of experimental medicine, observation and epistemology. What is the best way of uncovering secrets, and what part does knowledge of the body play in this? Can medical training benefit from a thorough understanding of emotion? And does gender play a part in this? Issues of ‘heart’ and ‘science’ reverberate across Collins’s work, from the Major’s collection of women’s hair in The Law and the Lady (1875) to Ezra Jenning’s solution to the crime of The Moonstone (1868). This conference takes as its focus the proliferation of “heart” and “science” throughout Collins’s work.
The majority of us use special collections and archival materials in the course of our literature and science research, but we are not always encouraged to reflect upon the ramifications of doing so. This symposium will provide an important opportunity to stimulate and facilitate much needed discussion of the challenges as well as successes of finding science in the archives.
For this event, we have adopted a different format from the standard academic twenty-minute conference paper, and will ask speakers to present in a more informal tone and for different lengths of time depending on the session. These shorter, less formal presentations will minimise preparation time for speakers as well as increasing discussion time for all participants.
We would like to thank the British Society for Science and Literature, and the University of Reading Museums and Special Collections, for generously supporting this event.
For queries, please contact the organisers: Verity Burke and Clare Stainthorp, at v.burke@pgr.reading.ac.uk and cgs288@bham.ac.uk
My role as Events Manager was wide-ranging, overseeing an interdepartmental and inter-institutional project with a focus on both local and national cultural impact.
Invited Papers by Verity Burke
This paper analyses the uses these objects are put to in contemporary NHM displays to uncover how the interplay between media and narrative frames our understanding of non-human life, and to advocate for renewed attention to these inorganic forms of representation. While the natural world has always been mediated through museum display, how does this mediation change when exhibition narratives are constructed without using the organic remains of the animals they represent?
‘Facing Extinction’ examines exhibits in which animal death masks play an integral role, focussing on male gorillas kept in city zoos who grew to be local celebrities and were preserved for display in their regional museum, and who had a cast taken of their face after death. In particular, this paper will focus on the plaster cast of ‘Alfred’, a western lowland gorilla who spent his life in captivity in Bristol Zoo Gardens. On his death, both the zoo and Alfred’s fans were keen to memorialise him. A death mask was taken, a bronze bust was cast and taxidermy mounted, capturing Alfred’s well-known features, while archives and exhibition interpretation emphasised his personality, suggesting that capturing his character has been key in preserving Alfred beyond mere physical form. Objects representing Alfred have since proliferated across Bristol’s museums, zoo and wider cultural landscape, many of which continue his role as a species ambassador and raise awareness for the plight of gorillas.
However, the death mask’s own historic connection with the preservation of human faces constitutes a cultural heritage which draws in the traditions of portraiture, celebrity and memorialisation. Although these traditions can speak meaningfully to how we conceptualise charismatic megafauna and species ambassadors (especially when these are species visually similar to our own), this paper argues that the display of animal death masks materialises the distorted boundaries present in museum conservation narratives: between individual and species, human and non-human, endangered animal and celebrity.
with science fiction in museums, and outline the essays
that will, we hope, stimulate further critical discussion on this topic.
representations of natural and cultural history, it is widely accepted
that no display neutrally presents an objectively realized exterior
world. In this piece, we further that argument by drawing attention
to the narrative techniques implicit in staging extinct life, focussing
in particular on the similarity between museum display and the tropes
of fantasy worldbuilding. We present three short case studies in which
Mesozoic life is used in narratives that are straightforwardly at odds
with the scientific consensus: the Creation Museum in Kentucky, USA;
Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire in the UK; and the display contexts
of the dinosauroid, a speculative Stenonychosaurus model created by
the Canadian Dale Russell. Our aim is to demonstrate how museums
put genre and storytelling to counterfactual purposes. Museums, we
conclude, build worlds: worlds that are putatively similar to the one
we live in but can just as easily be fictitious. The fact/fantasy boundary
is almost always more porous than our shared impressions of museum
authenticity typically suggest.
editor who later became a lecturer in English literature at Princeton.
Today he is best remembered for leaving the University a remarkable
collection of life and death masks that he spent many years accumulating
and researching. This body of casts reveals a vital element of Hutton’s
collecting praxis: his belief that death was a critical (perhaps even the
critical) component of enduring celebrity. Death masks – a wax or
plaster cast taken posthumously from a person’s face – were executed
for a number of reasons: scientific, artistic, or intensely personal. In all
cases, though, there was a desire to preserve a hypothetically objective
likeness of an important person, marking a shift between the perceived
binary of life and death. While the death mask facilitated a sense of
proximity to the celebrity body, Hutton was driven to flesh these faces
out with an array of ephemera, including portraits, autographs,
photographs of graves, strands of hair, and even casts of their hands.
For Hutton, this triangulation figured as an attempt to capture a physical
closeness to the bodies of departed celebrities, an urge he articulated
explicitly in his unpublished writings. This article offers a new lens
through which to consider celebrity mementoes – as relics in which the ‘imprint’ of the individual is sought and as icons through which we
attempt to materialise celebrity.
Each session is hosted on Zoom to allow for international participation, and will take the format of short papers around a specific theme, followed by a synthesised Q&A and discussion.
We are at a crucial historical moment, in which the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List has announced a catastrophic decline in global biodiversity. Museums have an important role to play in communicating the value of nature. Yet nature is, necessarily, interpreted in museums, through taxidermy dioramas and skeletal mounts; virtual tours and digital databases; image, text and film. This event series brings together museum professionals and academics across disciplines to encourage vital conversations about the museum mediation of the natural world during the sixth mass extinction. Each session will be hosted on Zoom to allow for international participation, and will take the format of short papers around a specific theme, followed by a roundtable discussion.
Deadline for CFP: Friday 17th June 2016
Conference date: 24th September 2016
Location: Barts Pathology Museum, London
Keynote: Dr. Tara MacDonald (University of Idaho)
‘“Why can’t I look into your heart, and see what secrets it is keeping from me?”’
The protagonist of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), surgeon Ovid de Vere, laments the difficulty in deciphering hidden emotions and secrets. Yet, the language suggests his medical background, striking a note with the novel’s supposedly anti-vivisection message and highlighting contemporary debates into the nature of experimental medicine, observation and epistemology. What is the best way of uncovering secrets, and what part does knowledge of the body play in this? Can medical training benefit from a thorough understanding of emotion? And does gender play a part in this? Issues of ‘heart’ and ‘science’ reverberate across Collins’s work, from the Major’s collection of women’s hair in The Law and the Lady (1875) to Ezra Jenning’s solution to the crime of The Moonstone (1868). This conference takes as its focus the proliferation of “heart” and “science” throughout Collins’s work.
The majority of us use special collections and archival materials in the course of our literature and science research, but we are not always encouraged to reflect upon the ramifications of doing so. This symposium will provide an important opportunity to stimulate and facilitate much needed discussion of the challenges as well as successes of finding science in the archives.
For this event, we have adopted a different format from the standard academic twenty-minute conference paper, and will ask speakers to present in a more informal tone and for different lengths of time depending on the session. These shorter, less formal presentations will minimise preparation time for speakers as well as increasing discussion time for all participants.
We would like to thank the British Society for Science and Literature, and the University of Reading Museums and Special Collections, for generously supporting this event.
For queries, please contact the organisers: Verity Burke and Clare Stainthorp, at v.burke@pgr.reading.ac.uk and cgs288@bham.ac.uk
My role as Events Manager was wide-ranging, overseeing an interdepartmental and inter-institutional project with a focus on both local and national cultural impact.
This paper analyses the uses these objects are put to in contemporary NHM displays to uncover how the interplay between media and narrative frames our understanding of non-human life, and to advocate for renewed attention to these inorganic forms of representation. While the natural world has always been mediated through museum display, how does this mediation change when exhibition narratives are constructed without using the organic remains of the animals they represent?
‘Facing Extinction’ examines exhibits in which animal death masks play an integral role, focussing on male gorillas kept in city zoos who grew to be local celebrities and were preserved for display in their regional museum, and who had a cast taken of their face after death. In particular, this paper will focus on the plaster cast of ‘Alfred’, a western lowland gorilla who spent his life in captivity in Bristol Zoo Gardens. On his death, both the zoo and Alfred’s fans were keen to memorialise him. A death mask was taken, a bronze bust was cast and taxidermy mounted, capturing Alfred’s well-known features, while archives and exhibition interpretation emphasised his personality, suggesting that capturing his character has been key in preserving Alfred beyond mere physical form. Objects representing Alfred have since proliferated across Bristol’s museums, zoo and wider cultural landscape, many of which continue his role as a species ambassador and raise awareness for the plight of gorillas.
However, the death mask’s own historic connection with the preservation of human faces constitutes a cultural heritage which draws in the traditions of portraiture, celebrity and memorialisation. Although these traditions can speak meaningfully to how we conceptualise charismatic megafauna and species ambassadors (especially when these are species visually similar to our own), this paper argues that the display of animal death masks materialises the distorted boundaries present in museum conservation narratives: between individual and species, human and non-human, endangered animal and celebrity.
Kahn’s Anatomical and Pathological Museum started life as a lauded scientific institution, but was beset by scandal mere years later, accused by the medical press of displaying inappropriately sexual models, exhibiting bodies not just to men but to women and children, and for selling quack remedies on its premises. Kahn’s popular institution exemplifies some of the problems encountered by anatomy museums in the nineteenth century, and their necessity to differentiate themselves from fairground attractions and titillation. This paper will demonstrate how, museums borrowed techniques from literature to navigate these issues of respectability, using texts to augment their objects and to place them within narratives, a technique that mirrored the patterns and series of curation and display. Popular literature, itself beleaguered by similar accusations of impropriety, borrowed the respectable techniques of the museum, reading bodies for signs of criminality, ordering objects to solve mysteries and restore respectability.
What is a giant doing in the Royal College of Surgeon's Hunterian Museum? Why were the Victorians worried that anatomy museums were too sexy? And how can we tour museums that no longer exist or have changed beyond recognition? Nineteenth-century anatomical museums and the bodies they displayed were embroiled in controversies from body-snatching to quakery, motiviating a need to differentiate the bodies on show in museums from those in freak shows and dubious commercial enterprises.
Focusing on the Hunterian, La Specola and Kahn's Anatomy Museum, Verity Darke discusses how these museums were composed not just of the arrangement and preservation of specimens, but with a vast array of media produced to inform, advertise and titilate the Victorian visitor.
An afternoon of roundtable discussions were held to showcase the work of twelve members of our research community and learn about their personal experiences. We hope that this forum will offer women considering a career in the arts & humanities an opportunity to gain first-hand insights, develop their career path, focus their motivations, and be better informed about career choices overall.
Closely associated with and used as a demonstration of the professionalization of medicine, nineteenth-century anatomical museums and the bodies they displayed were embroiled in controversies from body-snatching to quackery, motivating a need to differentiate the bodies on show in museums from those in freak shows and dubious commercial enterprises. This paper intends to read the catalogues, guidebooks and specimen representations of anatomy museums alongside more popular representations (such as those in Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words and Wilkie Collins's novel The Law and the Lady) to consider how anatomical intermediality worked to legitimize the museum project.
‘Alfred’, Bristol Zoo’s famous gorilla, is one such case. Arriving from Mbalmayo in Cameroon, the endangered animal was named after a philanthropic Bristolian and dressed in human clothes, while his image was sent around the world in the form of souvenir postcards. On his death, both the zoo and Alfred’s fans were keen to memorialise the western lowland gorilla. A death mask was taken, a bronze bust was cast and taxidermy mounted, capturing Alfred’s well-known features, while archives and exhibition interpretation emphasised his personality, suggesting that capturing his character has been key in preserving Alfred beyond mere physical form. Objects representing Alfred have since proliferated across Bristol’s museums, zoo and wider cultural landscape, continuing his role as a species ambassador and raising awareness for the plight of gorillas.
A comparative case wherein bodies were replicated and displayed before multiple audiences is Solitario Jorge- He became famous after he was found on Pinta Island where the species was already assumed extinct. Despite many attempts, he never reproduced and so his body became precious as the last known specimen of the species. His body was taxidermied at the AMNH in New York, where he was also displayed, before being transported back to the place he was considered to belong : The Research Station at Santa Cruz Island. His taxidermy life has given him a visual presence that has been duplicated and displayed before many publics as a symbol of the giant tortoises of the Galápagos. Solitario Jorge’s multiple presences in different sites reveal the meanings they convey to different publics in different geographic locations.
This paper examines these case studies to consider how and why different ephemera are used to tell an anthology of stories; what the presentation of these objects might tell us about human-animal entanglement; and what replication can tell us about narratives of near/extinction in public spaces.
Sensation fiction suffered similar imprecations for exhibiting sexualized bodies. Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) engages with the excesses and order of anatomical, medical and museum culture, his novel populated by characters that are simultaneously represented as specimens and curators, with clues collected from worryingly instable pathology, collections of female hair, and sexualized objects. Working with nineteenth-century anxieties about the differences between reputable and contentious displays of anatomy, Collins’s textualised and substitute bodies allow for the revelation of secrets and negotiate the tensions of the anatomy museum. This paper argues that museums and literature shared similar strategies to make these excessive bodies respectable, using narrative to order anatomy, to make displayed specimens educative instead of titillating. Reading the body could foster reason.
This paper intends to examine the Lapworth’s archive as a case study through which we can excavate the remains of animals and the museums that preserved, displayed and interpreted them. While museums may initially give the impression, as Carla Yanni suggests, of ‘knowledge in the form of specimens’, it is the museum’s other media that preserve its own past and the pasts of its animal-objects. The archive’s contents, ranging from the substantial records of a nineteenth-century geologist, to an opera written by the department’s students, reconstruct the means of discovering, teaching and displaying animal remains. How can we see long-changed exhibitions? Why did the Lapworth’s Irish Elk skeleton perambulate to Birmingham’s City Museum? And how can we re-visit the remains of animal remains? Analysing the Lapworth’s collections provides an insight into the interplay between museum and their collections, and suggests how animal remains refuse to conform to a singular media or genre.
Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) plays with the issues surrounding the anatomical museum. Collins’s engagement with medical and museum culture shapes his novel, in which characters are simultaneously represented as specimens and curators, and through which clues are collected from ‘curious’ cabinets and house-museums, worryingly instable pathology, classical statuary akin to the wax Venus, and book-body hybrids. Working with nineteenth-century anxieties about the differences between respectable and contentious displays of anatomy, Collins’s textualised and substitute bodies allow for the revelation of secrets and negotiate the tensions of the anatomy museum. This paper intends to read the representations of the Anatomical Venus and other problematic specimens in catalogues, guidebooks and museums alongside the object-bodies of The Law and the Lady to consider how knowledge is hermeneutically constructed, legitimizing anatomical intermediality and the museum project.
The language of the taxidermy manual reveals that these objects must be ‘re-assemble[d]’ or ‘re-unite[d]’. The taxidermy specimen is no longer ‘just’ an object, but must be interpreted by the taxidermist, both through the material reconstruction performed in the practice of taxidermy, and by the object’s articulation through narrative in the taxidermy manual. While Donna Haraway defines taxidermy as ‘about the single story, about nature’s unity, the unblemished type specimen … the art most suited to the epistemological and aesthetic stance of realism,’ taxidermy manuals reveal the painstaking process of construction, both materially and textually, that fractures the supposed objectivity of the specimen.
Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) presents taxidermied bodies that similarly disrupt a clear-cut epistemology into multiple ‘single stories’ that require interpretation. While the taxidermist’s art focuses on how to interpret nature as to best represent life, Dickens problematizes this desire, addressing instead the subjective nature of what Mrs R. Lee terms ‘sort of picture[s]’ and ‘articulations,’ and their claims to truth. In the representation of the ‘bird of prey’ Gaffer, and Mr. Inspector’s investigation into his death, Dickens explores how identities can be re-constructed, bodies re-membered and knowledge re-collected. This paper aims to examine Dickens’s novel and a number of taxidermy guides, to reflect on how physical and textual articulations disrupt the objectivity of body-object.
Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) similarly presents bodies and mysteries that fracture a clear-cut epistemology into multiple ‘single stories’ that require subjective reading to articulate them. While the taxidermist’s art focuses on how to interpret nature as to best represent life, Dickens problematizes this desire, addressing instead the subjective nature of these ‘sort of picture[s]’ and forms, and how they can be read. The imagery of taxidermy (and the figure of the taxidermist) thicken the pages of Dickens’s last completed body of work: from the echoes of the most popularly taxidermied animal, the bird, to anthropomorphic objects that reflect their viewer’s ‘reading’ of them, ‘paralytically animated’ (p.80) figures and blurred identities problematize reading the body as simply a site of objective knowledge. Examining the issues of the specimen in taxidermy manuals such as Montagu Browne’s Artistic and Scientific Taxidermy and Modelling (1896) and Mrs R. Lee’s Taxidermy (1820), alongside Dickens’s own reading and the anthropomorphized bodies that also populate the world of Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), this paper aims to implement an interdisciplinary reading of both scientific and literary texts, to highlight how reading the body-object plays a crucial role in the formation of knowledge.
On behalf of the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS), The Linnean Society of London is hosting an Engagement Fellowship, for researchers in the history of science, technology or medicine for a total duration of one month in 2017. It is anticipated that this BSHS-funded Fellowship project will be split into two, two-week placements; the first at Burlington House, Piccadilly to undertake research using the Linnean Society’s collections and archives, and the second at the Linnean Society’s Wimbledon site to then produce a science festival exhibition from the research.
About the Project
In this project, the Engagement Fellow would spend two weeks utilising a selection of the Linnean Society’s historical archives and collections for research. The Fellow would then be invited to prepare an article on their research for the Linnean Society magazine PuLSe. Having assisted with the Society’s exhibition at the Cambridge Science Festival in March 2017, in the second placement the Fellow would spend two weeks working with the Linnean Society Education Team to produce a new science fair exhibit based on their research and work. Finally, this exhibit will be converted into a fixed exhibition or workshop run from within the Linnean Society headquarters at Burlington House, London.
The exhibition will run from Monday 19th to Wednesday 28th October 2015, with media tweets being released around 8.30am and 4.30pm GMT daily. You can follow along via the #ColeEx hashtag and the tweets will be sent by @VerityBurke_ - you don’t have to be a Twitter user to view the tweets, but will need to hold an account to respond on Twitter.
Although the exhibition is discursive and aimed at a general audience, the underlying questions are of interest to a range of researchers, including those in the disciplines of history, literature, biology and zoology, as well as archival and museum practice. Some of these questions will be addressed further at the BSLS Winter Symposium, ‘Science in the Archives’ (more on the symposium here: http://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/science-in-the-archives-bsls-winter-symposium-tickets-18860410997).
What are the intersections between museums, archives and departments? How and where do architectural, literary and pedagogical structures meet? How can we locate literature and science in archival material?
Interaction from any and everyone is highly encouraged, and a Storify will be composed of #ColeEx material and selected responses.
Deadline for Articles: 31st May 2017
‘“Why can’t I look into your heart, and see what secrets it is keeping from me?”’
The protagonist of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), surgeon Ovid de Vere, laments the difficulty in deciphering hidden emotions and secrets. Yet the language suggests his medical background, striking a note with the novel’s supposedly anti-vivisection message and highlighting contemporary debates into the nature of experimental medicine, observation and epistemology. What is the best way of uncovering secrets, and what part does knowledge of the body play in this? Can medical training benefit from a thorough understanding of emotion? And does gender play a part in this? Issues of ‘heart’ and ‘science’ reverberate across Collins’s work, from the Major’s collection of women’s hair in The Law and the Lady (1875) to Ezra Jenning’s solution to the crime of The Moonstone (1868). This issue takes as its focus the proliferation of “heart” and “science” throughout Collins’s work.
Email abstracts to jo.parsons@falmouth.ac.uk and V.Burke@pgr.reading.ac.uk by 28th February 2017.
This is an excellent opportunity to contribute to a growing and well-regarded journal, as well as enhance your academic C.V. We are interested in attracting reviewers at all career stages, and welcome postgraduate students and ECRs to our team. All reviewers will be listed on our website:
If interested, please email a CV and list of academic interests to jo.parsons@falmouth.ac.uk and V.Burke@pgr.reading.ac.uk.
Established in 1981,The Wilkie Collins Journal is dedicated to furthering our understanding of the life and works of Wilkie Collins. Its particular aim is to promote new methodological approaches to Collins’s writings as well as to broaden our understanding of the larger context from which those works emerged.
The editorial team is particularly eager to publish works on the lesser-known texts of the author, although articles offering fresh approaches to the better-known novels of the 1860s will be considered. The WCJ is also interested in related authors and ‘sensation fiction’ broadly defined, hence articles on authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, Florence Marryat, will also be considered. To find out more, please visit the submissions page.
https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/event/dinosaurs-and-art
Read the rest of the review via the link below.
theories have been used to interpret De Quincey’s works and that, in wider terms, the nineteenth-century idea of the subconscious has been “almost completely obliterated
by Freud’s psychoanalysis” (294). Rather than the Freudian unconscious, which focuses on “the irrational, the innate sex drives, and the symbolic instantiation of repressed childhood experiences,” Iseli’s article seeks to reorientate present
scholarship, foregrounding instead the “cognitive unconscious” – those “complex and rational processes that are not part of conscious reflection” – as a way of understanding De Quincey’s use of the term (295). In short, Iseli’s article “seeks to
provide an alternative approach to the unconscious in literary studies, the cognitive unconscious, at the example of De Quincey’s coinage and usage of subconscious” in
order to “to sharpen our awareness of the pre-Freudian tradition and determine the frequently implicit meanings of nineteenth-century accounts” (295).
The rest of the review is available via the link.
Read further via the link to the full review: http://www.bsls.ac.uk/reviews/romantic-and-victorian/james-secord-visions-of-science-books-and-readers-at-the-dawn-of-the-victorian-age/
Read more via the link: https://fournationshistory.wordpress.com/2016/01/04/with-a-mind-divided-degeneration-and-national-identity-in-robert-louis-stevensons-the-ebb-tide/