LitSciPod: The Literature and Science Podcast

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)

Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.

About the episode:

This sixth episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with Dr Heather Love, Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Waterloo (Canada). Heather discusses her work on cybernetics in the works of Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf, as well as modernism and diagnosis. She introduces us to her new project on obstetrics and explores her unique relationship with the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Together, we consider the importance of the concept of the cluster to her research.

At the end of the episode, you can hear Heather read an excerpt from Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937).

Episode resources (in order of appearance):

• Gabriel Roberts, “ The Humanities in Modern Britain: Challenges and Opportunities”, Higher Education Policy Institute (2021)

• Lord Browne, “Securing a sustainable future for higher education: an independent review of higher education funding and student finance” (2010)

• Royal Society, “Jobs are changing, so should education” (2019)

• Heather Love, “The Cluster as Interpretive Gesture” in “Traces”, Open Thresholds (2017): http://openthresholds.org/2/clusterasinterpretivegesture.

• Love, “Newsreels, Novels, and Cybernetics: Reading the Random Patterns of John Dos Passos's U.S.A.”, Journal of Modern Literature

• Janet Galligani Casey, Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine (1998)

• Walter Pater, The Renaissance

• William James, The Principles of Psychology

• Ross Ashby, “The Black Box”, An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956).

• Sylvan Thompkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Positive Affects (1962)

• Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)

•Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (1915–38)

• Paul Jaussen, Writing in Real Time: Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital (2017)

• John Dos Passos, USA Trilogy (1930–6); Manhattan Transfer (1925)

• Love, “Cybernetic Modernism and the Feedback Loop: Ezra Pound’s Poetics of Transmission”, Modernism/modernity (2016)

• Joy Division, “Transmission”, Novelty (1979)

•Ezra Pound, Cantos LII–LXXI (1940)

• Woolf, “Character in Fiction” The Criterion (1924)

• Ford Madox Ford, “On Impressionism,” Poetry and Drama (1913)

• Rudolf Arnheim, Rundfunk als hörkunst (1933), translated as Radio as Sound (1936)

• University of Waterloo, Co-op Program (https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/co-op); Master of Arts in Experimental Digital Media (https://uwaterloo.ca/english/xdm)

• Siegfried Zielinski, [. . . After the Media]: News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century (2013)

• Love & Lisa Mendelman, Modernism and Diagnosis in Modernism/modernity Print Plus 6.2 (2021): https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0198

• Kevin Jackson, Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One (2012)

• Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (2015)

Stephens, “Stars in My Pocket Like Bits of Data: The poetics of information overload”, Guernica (15 July 2015)

• Robertson Collection, Museum of Healthcare at Kingston. See https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/objects-of-intrigue-museum-of-health-care-moulages

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)

Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.

About the episode:

This fifth episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with Dr John Holmes, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. John discusses how poetry helps us to negotiate the legacies of Darwin’s discoveries and the Pre-Raphaelites’ shaping of the culture of Victorian science (and vice versa). He introduces us to the Synopsis Network, which explores art in natural history museums, to the Ruskin Land project in the Wyre Forest, and to his more recent work responding to COP26 from an humanities perspective. We also debate the importance of method to disciplines.

At the end of the episode, you can hear John read ‘Editorial. By the President of the Therolinguistics Association’ from ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Episode resources (in order of appearance):

• Catherine Charlwood, ‘“Such a pair!”: The Twin Lives of Humans and Trees’, Hay Festival 2019

• Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century (1995)

• Susanne Bach and Folkert Degenring (eds), Dark Nights, Bright Lights: Night, Darkness, and Illumination in Literature (2015)

• Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020)

• Isabelle Tree, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm (2018)

• Russell Foster, Understanding the Impact of Sleep Loss in the Industrial Era (2018)

• Jules Michelet, Le Peuple (1846)

• John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings, ed. by Clive Wilmer (Penguin, 1985)

• The Symbiosis Network

• Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest, Guild of St George

• John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution

• The Kogi people, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1990)

• The Kogi people, Aluna (2012)

• The Germ (1850)

• John Holmes, ‘Rebels art and science: the empirical drive of the Pre-Raphaelites’ Nature 562, 490-491 (2018)

• Charles Allston Collins, Covent Thoughts (1850-51)

• William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1851-53)

• The Fairy Creek Blockcade

• FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992)

• Alberta’s Energy “War Room” takes on a Netflix family cartoon

• Bigfoot Family (2020)

• Michael E. Mann tweet 17th October 2020

• Yu-Tzu Wu et al., Perceived and objective availability of green and blue spaces and quality of life in people with dementia: results from the IDEAL programme (2021)

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)

Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.

About the episode:

This fourth episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with Professor Simon John James (@ProfSJJames) of Durham University. A well-established literary critic of the nineteenth-century novel, Simon discusses his long-standing interests in the relationship between literature and science: its historical origins and H. G. Wells’s role, all the way up to what scientists and literary critics can offer each other today. Given Simon’s role in the Durham Commission on Creativity in Education, we also discuss the importance of an interdisciplinary perspective within our schooling systems.

Episode resources (in order of appearance):

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015)

The 1870 Education Act

Simon James, ‘Literature and Science’ (2011)

Richard Bower and Simon James, ‘Time travel: a conversation between a physicist and a literature professor’ (2017)

Simon James, ‘Science journals: The worlds of H. G. Wells’, Nature 537, 162–164 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1038/537162a

Durham Commission on Creativity in Education (2019)

Tom McCleish, The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (2019)

Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003)

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)

Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.

About the episode:

This third episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with education researcher and recent DPhil graduate Dr Ashmita Randhawa (@Rand_Ash). Through a discussion of Ashmita’s thesis on studio schools, we consider educational policy, STEM and the language of aspiration, and the long history of STEM shortages. At the end of the episode, you can hear Ashmita read Sarah Key’s poem ‘Be’. You can watch Sarah Kay reading it here https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_if_i_should_have_a_daughter?language=en

Materials discussed:

Catherine Charlwood, ‘“Context is all: Science, society and the novel’, English Review, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2021)

Ashmita Randhawa, STEM and the Studio: understanding the role of Studio Schools in technical education, DPhil thesis

James Robson, Ashmita Randhawa, and Ewart Keep, ‘Employability Skills in Studio Schools: Investigating the use of the CREATE Framework’. London: The Edge Foundation, 2018 http://www. edge. co. uk/sites/default/files/documents/create_final_report_december2018_1.pdf

Melissa Dickson, ‘Knocking Some Sense into Them: Overpressure Debates and the Education of Mind and Body’ in Anxious times: medicine and modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, eds. Amelia Bonea, Melissa Dickson, Sally Shuttleworth and Jennifer Wallis, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, University of Pittsburgh Press (2019), pp. 158-89

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)

Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.

About the episode:

This second episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with modern linguist, early modernist and Francophile Dr Jennifer Oliver (@jenhelenoliver) discussing shipwrecks and technological developments.

Materials discussed:

Gordon Lightfoot, “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzTkGyxkYI)

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1875–6,1918)

About the Edmund Fitzgerald: https://www.shipwreckmuseum.com/edmund-fitzgerald/the-fateful-journey/

Maritime Museum of the Great Lakes: https://www.marmuseum.ca/

Josephine Mandamin’s Water Walker movement: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/trekking-the-great-lakes-on-foot-to-raise-awareness-about-water-pollutants-1.4161467

Truth and Reconciliation: the legacy of Canada’s residential schools: http://nctr.ca/reports.php

Great Lakes Guardian’s Council: https://www.ontario.ca/page/great-lakes-guardians-council

Walter de la Mare, “The Wreck”, The Veil and Other Poems (1922)

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1899)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

Sea Shanties

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-55661351

Noise Pollution

Duarte, et al. “The soundscape of the Anthropocene ocean”, Science, Vol. 371, Issue 6529 (5 Feb 2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.aba4658 (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6529/eaba4658)

Walruses

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56404484

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-56470235

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)

Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.

About the episode:

This first episode of the new, third series of LitSciPod sees the co-hosts reflecting on what the pandemic has taught us about the indivisible connection between the humanities and the sciences. We cover vaccine communications and vaccine hesitancy, Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s reflections on scientific truth, and books which have got us thinking.

Materials discussed:

Sally Frampton, ‘Vaccine scepticism is as old as vaccines themselves. Here's how to tackle it’ The Guardian (23 Feb 2021): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/23/vaccine-scepticism-how-to-tackle-it

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (Faber, 2021)

Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021)

Charlotte Sleigh, “The abuses of Popper,” Aeon (16 Feb 2021): https://aeon.co/essays/how-popperian-falsification-enabled-the-rise-of-neoliberalism

What Laura & Catherine have been reading:

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889)

Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife (2020)

Daisy Johnson, Sisters (2020)

Lucy Hughes-Hallet, Fabulous (2019)

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1899)

Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918)

Kevin N. Laland, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (2017)

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)

Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.

About the episode:

The sixth episode of the second series of LitSciPod is all about analogy and language shared between literature (especially poetry), science, and science writing.

Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Greg Tate (@drgregorytate), Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of St Andrews. Greg shares his research on matter, form, and rhythm in nineteenth century poetry and the physical sciences. He asks why there is so much poetry in the science writing of the period (and even today) and what that says about the connections between literature and science. Greg also discusses how Hardy’s poetry draws on Einstein’s theory of relativity, why the concept of the ether is so important to science and poetry.

At the end of the episode, you can hear Greg read an excerpt from Mathilde Blind’s The Ascent of Man (1889).

Episode resources (in order of appearance):

Introduction:

Michael Faraday’s letter to sister Margaret quoted in Dafydd Tomos (ed.), Michael Faraday in Wales, including Faraday’s Journal of his Tour through Wales in 1819 (Denbigh, 1972), 58.

T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)

Robert Frost, ‘A Patch of Old Snow’ (1916)

Interview:

Greg Tate, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences: Poetical Matter (Palgrave, 2019)

William Whewell’s review of J. Herschel's Preliminary discourse on the study of Natural Philosophy in The Quarterly Review 45.90 (1831), pp. 374-407.

Thomas Hardy, ‘The Absolute Explains’ (1924)

Hilaire Belloc, ‘The Fake Newdigate Poem’ (~1894)

Patrick Guthrie Tait and Balfour Steward, The Unseen Universe (1875)

Be sure to check out our new Tumblr page, which includes bonus material for each episode: https://litscipod.tumblr.com/.

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)

Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.

Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Robert C. Engen (@RobertEngen), Assistant Professor in the Department of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College. Robert discusses his interdisciplinary research on parallels between the military responses to the 1918 pandemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic, public health and global conflict, a project commemorating the Battle of Hill 70, as well as more recent work on the human dimension of AI in warfare. At the end of the episode, you can hear Robert read an extract from The Glass Bead by Herman Hesse.

Episode resources (in order of appearance):

Introduction:

-Katie Russell, ‘“Arts subjects have as much value as STEM”: the new education campaign tackling the myth of 'soft' degrees’, The Telegraph (25 June 2020)

-Vanessa Thorpe, ‘University and Arts Council in drive to re-brand “soft” academic subjects’, The Guardian (21 June 2020)

Interview:

-Pamela K. Gilbert, Cholera and Nation (2008)

-Claire Hooker, Chris Degeling and Paul Mason, ‘Dying a Natural Death: Ethics

-Robert C. Engen, “CAF health protection during pandemic disease events: 1918 and 2020”, Journal of Veteran, Military, and Family Health (preprint, May 2020)

-Commonwealth War Graves Commission

-Robert C. Engen, Canadians Under Fire: Infantry Effectiveness in the Second World War (2009)

-Robert C. Engen, Strangers in Arms: Combat Motivation in the Canadian Army (2016)

-Robert C. Engen, Douglas Delaney, Meghan Fitzpatric (eds.) Military Education and the British Empire, 1815-1949 (2018)

-Museum of Healthcare at Kingston - Margaret Angus Fellowship

-Hill 70 project

-Robert C. Engen, Inhuman Dimensions of Warfare (blog)

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric). Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones.

Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Kari Nixon (@HalfSickShadows). At the end of the episode, you can hear Kari read the poem ‘Inskripsjoner/Inscriptions’ bilingually in Norweigian and English by Tarjei Vesaas, trans. by Kenneth G. Chapman.

Episode resources:

Introduction:

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)

Catherine Charlwood, ‘“Habitually Embodied” Memories: The Materiality and Physicality of Music in Hardy's Poetry’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479409819000338

Sile O’Modhrain and R. Brent Gillespie (2018) ‘Once More, with Feeling: Revisiting the Role of Touch in Performer-Instrument Interaction’. In: Papetti S., Saitis C. (eds) Musical Haptics. Springer Series on Touch and Haptic Systems. Springer, Cham

Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)

Interview:

Pamela K. Gilbert, Cholera and Nation (2008)

Claire Hooker, Chris Degeling and Paul Mason, ‘Dying a Natural Death: Ethics and Political Activism for Endemic Infectious Disease’, in Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory, ed. by Kari Nixon and Lorenzo Servitje (2016), pp. 265-90

Anne Finger, Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (2013)

Giorgio Agamben, ‘L’invenzione di un’epidemia’ (25 February 2020)

The Art of Advertising. Bodleian Libraries (March to August 2020)

Robert Spear. ‘Arrest all dirt and cleanse everything.’ Hudson’s Dry Soap. The Sunday at Home (c. 1889)

Christopher Pittard, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (2011)

Henry Stacy Marks. ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness.’ A & F Pears Ltd (c. 1889)

Judith Walzer Levitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (1996)

Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2008)

Ellen Gutoskey, ‘Super Spreader: The Strange Story of Typhoid Mary’, Mental Floss (20 March 2020)

‘Influenza’ from the handwritten manuscript magazine for the Myllin Literary and Debating Society, number 1 (1898) held in the National Library of Wales archives

Kari Nixon, ‘I’m a Mom and a Vaccine Researcher. Here’s Why You Should Vaccinate Your Children’ HuffPost (25 April 2019)

Welsh Newspapers Online database, National Library of Wales

‘Vaccination Exemption’, South Wales Daily News (17 August 1899)

Teaser for Episode 4.