British Society for the History of Mathematics: Research in Progress Meeting 2014

The British Society for the History of Mathematics is holding its annual Research in Progress meeting on Saturday 22nd February at The Queen's College Oxford. Registration and coffee is at 10.30am. The keynote speaker is Dr. Jackie Stedall, winner of the Neumann Prize in 2013. She will speak on 'Eighteen years of research in progress: working on the manuscripts of Thomas Harriot.'

For a full programme see:

http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/bshm/meetings/BSHM-RIP2014-advertisement(Ver4).pdf

The cost is £20 payable on the day which includes lunch, tea and coffee.

Those wishing to attend should register by email to Terry Froggatt at bshm@tjf.org.uk, by Friday 14 February 2014.

The British Society for the History of Mathematics exists:
  • to promote and encourage research in the history of mathematics and the dissemination of the results of such research; 
  • to promote and develop for the public benefit, awareness, knowledge, study and teaching of the history of mathematics; 
  • to promote the use of the history of mathematics at all levels in mathematics education in order to enhance the teaching of mathematics for the public benefit.

Jane Wess (meetings secretary)

Italy Made in England: Contemporary British Perspectives on Italian Culture






Provisional Programme 
Booking Form
Booking Form pdf

Directions and Maps / B&B on campus / B&B off campus

Special Discount - Members of Warwick Italian Society - registration fee only £7.50 Booking Form / Booking Form pdf

‘The Italy perceived by the British travellers is – at the least – “half-created” by them. Or, to put it in less romantic and more fashionable terms: it is a construction, an “Italy made in England”’

M. Pfister, The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers

Our proposal is to bring together scholars and specialists from a wide range of disciplines to answer the following critical questions: why are some aspects of Italian culture overlooked, given that an Anglophone, and indeed global, audience engages keenly with several others? What are the reasons for this selection? How is Italy perceived within global culture, and indeed, how many and what kinds of Italies circulate today? This will span from the Renaissance image of Italy as a pinnacle of culture to the modern-day ‘sick man of Europe’. By including experts from History, Philosophy, Film Studies and Art History, as well as Italianists, we hope to broaden our understanding of the subject we study as well as probe wider questions about the nature of audience reception and the (mis)fortunes of culture beyond national boundaries in today’s world.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Bill Emmott - former editor of the Economist, author ofGood Italy, Bad Italy
and co-creator of the documentaryGirlfriend in a Coma with Annalisa Piras.

Donald Sassoon - Department of History, Queen Mary, University of London

Organisers: Giacomo Comiati / Martina Piperno / Kate Willman


CALL FOR PAPERS: The British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM) Research in Progress Meeting 2014

The British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM) will hold its annual "Research in Progress" meeting at The Queen's College, Oxford on Saturday 22 February 2014. This meeting provides a forum for research students in the history of mathematics to talk about their work to a friendly, supportive and knowledgeable audience. Since there are relatively few students working in this area, such opportunities are not always easy to find.

The organising committee are Dr Jackie Stedall, Rosanna Cretney and Dr Peter M Neumann

We would welcome suggestions of possible speakers. If any student in your department is working on the history of mathematics we (any or all of the organising committee) would be very grateful to be put in touch with them.




The Northern Renaissance Seminar: ‘To set the word against the word’: new directions in early modern textual analysis’

The Northern Renaissance Seminar in association with CREME: http://creme.lancs.ac.uk/

‘To set the word against the word’: new directions in early modern textual analysis’, Lancaster University, Saturday 22 February 2014, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences Building, Meeting Room 3

Programme

10.00-10.30 Jonathan Culpeper and Alison Findlay-Contemporary understandings of Welsh, Scottish and Irish identities: Celtic characters in Shakespeare’s Henry V

10.30-11.00 Helen Davies-The Digitisation of early modern ‘disability’: ways of reading bodily difference in Tudor literature.

11.00-11.30 Amanda Pullan-Locating the discourse surrounding ‘Hagar and Ishmael’ in early modern English texts

11.30-1.00 Brunch

1.00-2.00 Andrew Hardie-The affordances of corpus analysis software in approaching EEBO-TCP

2.00-2.30 Jake Halford-Everything goes with Bacon: The legacy of Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century

2.30-3.00 Break

3.00-3.30 Rachel White-Surly Areopagites and Poetic Reform

3.30-4.00 Liz Oakley-Brown-Thomas Churchyard’s Corpus: material body and digital text

NB There is no registration fee. Please contact Liz Oakley-Brown (e.oakley-brown@lancaster.ac.uk) to register

St. John Historical Society: The Red Bull Playhouse, Clerkenwell and the Revels Office at St. John's

The St. John Historical Society is hosting a talk about the Red Bull playhouse. This will be given at the Museum of the Order of St. John - the site of the Revels Office in Clerkenwell where the Master of the Revels monitored drama for performances at court. Visitors must have included Shakespeare and his associates and the actors of the Red Bull located nearby.

Title: 'The Red Bull Playhouse, Clerkenwell and the Revels Office at St. John's'
Speaker: Dr. Eva Griffith
Venue: The Chapter Hall at the Museum of the Order of St. John Clerkenwell (entrance in St. John's Gate)
Date and time: Thursday 20th February at 7pm
Hosts: St. John Historical Society
Cost: Free
Refreshments: Available

The talk will be illustrated with pictures, and actors will play scenes from Red Bull plays.

CALL FOR PAPERS: 8th London Ancient Science Conference

The Conference will be at the Institute of Classical Studies, London on Monday February 17th and Tuesday February 18th.

Papers are welcome on any aspect of ancient science (philosophical, historical, technical, sociological) and can be on the ancient science of any culture.

Papers will usually be around 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion though that is open to negotiation.

Papers are welcome from PhD students and postdocs as well as established academics.

Please send a title and short abstract for your paper to Andy Gregory.

There is a website for the conference at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/silva/sts/staff/gregory/lasc with titles/ abstracts from the first 7 conferences.

The conference is sponsored by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL

NEW POSITION: Max Planck Institute: Junior and Senior Visiting Residential Fellowships

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (Max Planck Research Group Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe; Director: Prof. Dr. Sven Dupré) announces three junior and senior visiting residential fellowships for up to three months between January 1 and December 31, 2015. Outstanding junior and senior scholars (including those on sabbatical leave from their home institutions) are invited to apply.

Candidates should hold a doctorate in the history of science and technology, the history of art and art technology or related field (junior scholars should have a dissertation topic relevant to the history of science) at the time of application and show evidence of scholarly promise in the form of publications and other achievements.

Research projects should address the history of knowledge and art up to the eighteenth century (with a preference for the period between 1350 and 1750), and may concern any geographical area within Europe, and any object of the visual and decorative arts. For short descriptions of the projects of the Max Planck Research Group, see http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/projects/MRGdupre.

Visiting fellows are expected to take part in the scientific life of the Institute, to advance their own research project, and to actively contribute to the project of the Max Planck Research Group Artand Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe.

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science is an international and interdisciplinary research institute (http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/index.html). The colloquium language is English; it is expected that candidates will be able to present their own work and discuss that of others fluently in that language. Fellowships are endowed with a monthly stipend between 2.100 € and 2.500 € (fellows from abroad) or between 1.468 € and 1.621 € (fellows from Germany), whereas senior scholars receive an honorary commensurate with experience.

The Max Planck Research Group Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe is also accepting proposals for non-funded Visiting Fellowships from one month to a year. These are normally open to junior and senior post-docs who have external funding. For projects highly relevant to the research platform of this Max Planck Research Group, Sven Dupré will support a limited number of applications for funding at organizations such as Fulbright, DAAD, and the Humboldt Society.

Candidates of all nationalities are encouraged to apply; applications from women are especially welcome. The Max Planck Society is committed to promoting handicapped individuals and encourages them to apply. Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Candidates are requested to submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae (including list of publications), a research proposal on a topic related to the project (750 words maximum), one sample of writing (i.e. article or book chapter) and two names of referees who have agreed to write a letter of recommendation to: https://s-lotus.gwdg.de/mpg/mbwg/fellowshipdupre_2014_01.nsf/application

Deadline for submission: 1 April 2014

For questions concerning the Max Planck Research Group on Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe, please see http://www.mpiwgberlin.

mpg.de/en/research/projects/MRGdupre or contact Sven Dupré
(officedupre@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de); for administrative questions concerning the position and the Institute, please contact Claudia Paaß (paass@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de),

Head of Administration, or Jochen Schneider (jsr@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de), Research Coordinator.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) Annual Meeting

Dearborn, Michigan
6-9 November, 2014

Call for Papers and Sessions

Formed in 1958, SHOT is an interdisciplinary and international organization concerned not only with the history of technological devices and processes but also with technology in history, the development of technology, and its relations with society and culture --that is, the relationship of technology to politics, economics, science, the arts, and the organization of production, and with the role it plays in the differentiation of individuals in society.

Accordingly, the Program Committee invites paper and session proposals on any topic in a broadly defined history of technology, including topics that push the boundaries of the discipline. The Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers or complete sessions from researchers at all levels. We also welcome proposals from all researchers, whether veterans or newcomers to SHOT's meetings, and regardless of primary discipline. Submitters are encouraged to propose sessions that include a diverse mix of participants: multinational origins, gender, graduate students and junior scholars with senior scholars, significantly diverse institutional affiliations, etc.

For the 2014 meeting the Program Committee welcomes proposals of three formats:
  • Individual papers
  • Sessions of 3 or 4 papers.
  • Unconventional sessions; that is, session formats that diverge in useful ways from the typical 3 or 4 papers with comment. These might include round-table sessions and workshop-style sessions with pre-circulated papers.

SHOT allows paper presentations at consecutive meetings but rejects submissions of papers that are substantially the same as previous accepted submissions. Submissions covering the same fundamental topic should explain the difference(s) with the prior presentation.

Specific instructions related to submissions (abstract, CV, etc.) are on the SHOT 2014 Call for Papers webpage (http://www.historyoftechnology.org/call_for_papers/).

The Program Committee has established a Facebook page to facilitate collaboration in establishing sessions: https://www.facebook.com/login.php?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fgroups%2F679068282131880%2F. Alternatively, postings to the sci-med-tech listserv (http://www.h-net.org/~smt/) can also facilitate collaboration and session-forming.

***The deadline for proposals is 31 March 2014 ***

Society for the History of Technology | David Lucsko | Department of History | 310 Thach Hall | Auburn University | AL | 36849-5207

NEW POSITION: Max Planck Institute: Post-Doctoral Fellowship

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (Max Planck Research Group Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe; Director: Prof. Dr. Sven Dupré) in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum (contact: Dr. Marta Ajmar, Head of Postgraduate Programme, V&A/RCA History of Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, London) announces one postdoctoral fellowship for three months between January 1 and December 31, 2015.

The tenure of the fellowship is to be divided between the two institutes: the first and third month will be spent at the MPIWG, the second month at the V&A. The fellow will be offered research facilities at both institutions.

Outstanding junior and senior scholars (including those on sabbatical leave from their home institutions) are invited to apply. Candidates should hold a doctorate in the history of science and technology, the history of art and art technology or a related field (junior scholars should have a dissertation topic relevant to the history of science) at the time of application and show evidence of scholarly promise in the form of publications and other achievements.

Research proposals should address the history of knowledge and art up to the eighteenth century (with a preference for the period between 1350 and 1750), and may concern any geographical area within Europe, and any object of the visual and decorative arts. Projects related to ongoing projects at the Max Planck Research Group Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe will receive preference. The proposal should make clear how the project would benefit from the resources and contribute to the research culture of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Visiting fellows are expected to take part in the scientific life of the Institute, to advance their own research project, and to actively contribute to the relevant project of the Max Planck Research Group Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe.


The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science is an international and interdisciplinary research institute (http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/index.html). The colloquium language is English; it is expected that candidates will be able to present their own work and discuss that of others fluently in that language. Fellowships are endowed with a monthly stipend between 2.100 € and 2.500 € (fellows from abroad) or between 1.468 € and 1.621 € (fellows from Germany), whereas senior scholars receive an honorary commensurate with experience. The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science covers the round trip travel costs from the fellow’s home institution and a round trip Berlin-London.


The Victoria and Albert Museum is the United Kingdom’s national museum of art, craft and design. It offers an encyclopaedic resource in its collections of the visual arts from Europe and Asia, of both historical and contemporary importance, and is a powerhouse of skills and expertise. Research relating to the arts and humanities takes place across the institution and is expressed in the form of gallery development, temporary exhibitions, books which range from the popular to the highly academic, journal articles, website material, conferences and colloquia. It supports collections-based research in all areas of art and design, ensuring that exhibition, publication and gallery projects are enhanced by the most relevant and up-to-date scholarship and benefit from appropriate academic partnerships and funding opportunities. The V&A houses the National Art Library, a major public reference library for art and design. Further outstanding expertise and resources relevant to the joint fellowship can be found in the V&A’s curatorial collections and Conservation department. In close scholarly proximity to the V&A are other key ‘Albertopolis’ institutions dedicated to science, technology, art and design – the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, Imperial College and the Royal College of Art.

Many research projects are located in the Research department, which supports a wide number of exhibition research teams, a further group of scholars and the V&A/RCA Postgraduate Programme in the History of Design. It produces a number of publications and web-based outputs (Online Journal, Research Report, Research Bulletins) and oversees seminars and workshops to support the development of staff research and subject expertise. The Visiting Fellow will be based in the Research department and be expected to participate to the vibrant research culture of the department and the V&A/RCA History of Design community. S/he will be expected to contribute a research seminar during the period of the fellowship.

Candidates of all nationalities are encouraged to apply; applications from women are especially welcome.

The Max Planck Society is committed to promoting handicapped individuals and encourages them to apply.

Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Candidates are requested to submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae (including list of publications), a research proposal on a topic related to the project (750 words maximum), one sample of writing (i.e. article or book chapter) and two names of referees who have agreed to write a letter of recommendation to:

https://s-lotus.gwdg.de/mpg/mbwg/vadupre_2014_03.nsf/application

Deadline for submission: 1 April 2014

For questions concerning the Max Planck Research Group on Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe, please see http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/projects/MRGdupre or contact Sven Dupré (mailto:officedupre@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de); for administrative questions concerning the position and the Institute, please contact Claudia Paaß (paass@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de), Head of Administration, or Jochen Schneider (jsr@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de), Research Coordinator.

For enquiries concerning the Victoria and Albert Museum’s component of the fellowship, please contact Dr. Marta Ajmar, Head of Postgraduate Programme, V&A/RCA History of Design, Victoria and Albert Museum (m.ajmar@vam.ac.uk).

For more information about the V&A and its resources, visit the website (http://www.vam.ac.uk/;

http://www.vam.ac.uk/page/n/national-art-library/; http://collections.vam.ac.uk/;

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/c/conservation-department/;

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/r/research-department/;

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/m/ma-history-of-design/).

Vacancy: The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science - PT Editorial Assistant

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science is seeking to appoint an Editorial assistant part-time (50%).

The post is tenable from April 1, 2014 (earlier start negotiable) until September 30, 2016. The newly appointed colleague will join the team of the Max Planck Research Group "Art and Knowledge in Premodern Europe, " (Director: Prof. Dr. Sven Dupré).

Candidates with experience in academic management and editorial tasks in a university, research institute or academic publishing environment, a working knowledge of German and excellent written and spoken English are invited to apply: native English speaker preferred. We are seeking a colleague with a genuine interest in academic work and basic historical knowledge. Candidates are expected to have comprehensive digital literacy (EndNote, Zotero, PhotoShop and Office), internet skills and the ability to work in a team and to contribute to collegiality.

Job profile:

The set up and day to day management of academic publication projects, articles, reviews, and edited volumes, to be executed by yourself with the support of a student assistant. Responsibilities include email correspondence with authors and publishers, proofreading, copy editing, formatting according to publishers style sheet, and the creation of shared bibliographies and indexes. In addition image research and acquisition of both digital files and permission to publish plays an important role.

Maintaining the web presence of the publication projects on the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science website rounds off your duties.

We offer A highly diversified and fascinating task in a family friendly and international atmosphere. Salary will be within the range of TVOD 10, bandwidth see http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tvoed/bund?id=tvoed-bund-2013; part time (50%).

Candidates of all nationalities are encouraged to apply. The Max Planck Society is committed to promoting handicapped individuals and encourages them to apply.  Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Candidates are requested to upload a cover letter, curriculum vitae including references (Zeugnisse) and certificates of qualification on: https://s-lotus.gwdg.de/mpg/mbwg/editiondupre_2014_02.nsf/application by Feb 24, 2014.

For questions concerning the Max Planck Research Group on Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe, please see here or contact Sven Dupré. For questions relating to the online application procedure please contact officedupre@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de.

For administrative questions concerning the position or the Institute, please contact Claudia Paaß, Head of Administration, or Jochen Schneider, Research Coordinator.


OU Book History Research Group: Paper, Pen and Ink: Manuscript Cultures in Early Modern England

Winter 2013 and Spring-Summer 2014

Download this information in PDF format [33 KB]

Venue: The Institute of English Studies, University of London,
Senate House, Room 234
Venue map for Senate House

Time: Mondays, 5.30-7.00pm (dates below)
About the series

This seminar series explores the rich variety of writing in manuscript that took place in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Each paper opens a window onto a different kind of manuscript activity - from the writing of poetry to the compilation of parish registers, from amateur and professional musicians’ use of lute-books to the note-taking strategies of university students - and assesses both its material processes and its broader cultural roles. As well as looking at the details of individual manuscripts (including previously unstudied material) and excavating the norms of a wide variety of different manuscript genres, speakers will provide new perspectives on topics such as the the history of manuscript studies, assumptions about the nature of ‘manuscript culture’ and ‘print culture’, the relationship between manuscripts and the ‘material turn’ in early modern studies and the challenges of editing early modern manuscripts.

Please contact the organiser, Dr Jonathan Gibson, Lecturer in the Department of English, for further information about the series
Speakers and Schedule

Monday 4 November 2013: Tom Lockwood (University of Birmingham)
“With wordes of my profession I replie’: New Manuscripts of Sir John Davies (1569-1626) and the Development of Manuscript Studies’
This paper will use the evidence of newly described manuscripts of Sir John Davies’ poems to explore the later-twentieth century development of manuscript studies leading up to, and following, Robert Krueger’s edition of The Poems of Sir John Davies (1975). Davies, styled a ‘lawyer and poet’ by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a kind of writer whose multiple engagements in poetry, patronage, politics and prose have often proved difficult to gauge and to place. This paper will situate case studies of manuscripts containing texts by Davies within the shape of his career and by tracing a larger account of developments in assumptions about, and understandings of, manuscript and print habits in the early modern period. Exploring the earlier history of Davies scholarship, it will suggest some ways in which, in the future, scholars working on Davies might respond to new developments in the field.

Dr Tom Lockwood is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He has recently edited, together with his colleagues Hugh Adlington and Gillian Wright, Chaplains in Early Modern England: Patronage, Literature and Religion (Manchester, 2013), and has published research on manuscript texts from the early modern to the Romantic periods. He gave the British Academy Chatterton Lecture on Poetry, ‘Donne, by Hand’, in 2009.

Monday 13 January 2014, Helen Smith (University of York)
‘Paper: Beyond Words’
‘Evidently, it is not enough to regard the surface as a taken-for-granted backdrop for the lines that are inscribed upon it’ (Tim Ingold).

In this ‘paper’, I will follow the lead offered by influential studies of manuscript letters (Gibson, Daybell) to investigate how men and women attended to the materiality and make-up of the paper on which they wrote. Drawing on a range of sources, I will draw the physical presence of writing paper into conversation with the very wide array of early modern paper uses and technologies, in order to suggest the kinds of social and cultural presence possessed by paper, and the varied relationships between paper and its users. By inquiring into natural philosophical uses of and investigations into paper, I will suggest that we can discover the multiple valences of paper as a substance for thinking on and thinking with. At the same time, by investigating the relationship between paper as both an object for, and a subject of, writing, I will suggest how paper works in both material and metaphorical ways to transact not simply social but emotional relationships. My paper thus aims to suggest the importance of bringing together material, critical, and historical studies of manuscript writing, and to explore the relevance of manuscript sources and study to the current critical obsession with objects and their meanings.

Dr Helen Smith is Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of York. Her publications include Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2012) andRenaissance Paratexts, co-edited with Louise Wilson. Helen was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, ‘Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe’, and is Principal Investigator for the AHRC Research Network, ‘Imagining Jerusalem, c. 1099 to the Present Day’. She is currently in the early stages of a new project, on ideas about materiality and their material expression in early modern Europe.

Monday 3 February , Sebastiaan Verweij (University of Oxford)
‘Reading Records: The Commonplace Books of Francis Russell at Woburn Abbey’
This paper will present and discuss the manuscript library of Francis Russell, fourth earl of Bedford. The purposes of the paper are two-fold. Firstly, it will draw attention to this important and under-studied collection of manuscripts and discuss both its bibliographical nature and the extent of its engagement with early-seventeenth century intellectual and political culture. Secondly, the paper will ask how such a varied and extensive collection of ‘reading records’ (notebooks, commonplace books,annotated manuscripts, and more) can contribute to the ways in which literary scholars and historians make sense of this period.

Dr Sebastiaan Verweij works at Oxford, where he is the Research Associate for the Oxford edition of the Sermons of John Donne. He has published on Scottish literary culture and manuscript studies, and works more generally on English and Scottish early modern literature and book history.

Monday 3 March 2014, Christopher Burlinson (Jesus College, Cambridge)
‘Manuscripts in the Early Modern Universities’
Studies of early modern manuscripts (by Hobbs, Marotti, Woudhuysen, et al.), in particular of the poetic miscellanies of the early seventeenth century, have shown beyond doubt that the universities (in particular Oxford, with a special concentration at Christ Church) were important centres of manuscript transmission. A study of this ‘socioliterary environment’ (Marotti) has begun to influence scholarly work on some of the poets whose texts are particularly well-represented in these manuscripts (Corbett, Strode, Randolph, etc.). But work still remains to be done in a number of areas, and this seminar will address two of them. Firstly, how did pedagogical or administrative life at the universities affect the kinds of manuscript transmission that might have taken place there? What place did manuscripts have in learning or in thedaily life of a college? Were universities, in other words, a special kind of socioliterary (and manuscript-based) environment, and why should this matter to the poetry that was written and transmitted there? And secondly, what can scholars of the universities themselves learn from this work on literary manuscript transmission? How might editorial and textual work on poetic miscellanies contribute to a broader social and cultural history of education, reading, and writing at the universities?

Dr Christopher Burlinson is Fellow and Senior College Lecturer at Jesus College Cambridge. He has published widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, textual studies, and the practice of textual editing. Recent publications include Edmund Spenser’s Letters and Other Papers (Oxford University Press, 2009), Ralph Knevet’sSupplement of the Faery Queen (Manchester University Press, forthcoming) - both with Andrew Zurcher - and, with Ruth Connolly, a special edition of Studies in English Literature (Winter 2012), entitled Editing Stuart Poetry.

Monday 17 March 2014, Carlo Bajetta (Università della Valle d’Aosta)
‘Making Sense of Chaos: Analysing Early Modern Manuscripts’
This talk will reconsider analytical and editorial methodology in early modern manuscript studies. After a look at the age-old, but still crucial, problem of how best to deal with the patent mistakes many early modern manuscript texts present (or seem to present), it will suggest a variety of ways in which a modern researcher can get the best out of the analysis of handwritten texts. By means of an examination of specific cases, including some of Elizabeth I’s Italian letters, I will illustrate the advantages of a case-to-case, evidence-based, approach to both editorial emendation and to the analysis of the material features of manuscript volumes.

Professor Carlo M. Bajetta is Professor of English at Università della Valle d’Aosta, Italy. His books include Sir Walter Ralegh (1998), Whole Volumes in Folio (2000), Some Notes on Printing and Publishing in Renaissance Venice(2000), and, with Luisa Camaiora, Shakespearean Readings: Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley (2004). He has edited R.B. McKerrow’s 1928 Sandars Lectures on authors’ manuscripts (Studies in Bibliography, 2000), Wordsworth’s, Shelley’s and Reynold’s 1819 Peter Bell poems (2005) and, in a bilingual edition, Thomas More’s English Poems. He has also published research on the fiction, literary criticism and letters of C.S. Lewis and is currently engaged on an edition of the Italian letters of Elizabeth I.

Monday 14 April 2014, Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC)
‘Rethinking the Price, Quality, and Social Significance of Writing Paper in Early Modern England’
This talk argues that regular-grade writing paper was relatively cheap and plentiful in early modern England, and that while most of it was imported from France, the domestic output should not be overlooked. I will focus in particular on the writing paper of John Spilman, which was highly regarded as early as 1590 when John Danett writes from Dublin: "paper is heere verye dere & verye Scante & very badd, neere Ivie bridge dwellinge one Spilman a jueller & maker of paper where it maye be bought for vs vjd the Realme verye large & verye good..." I will also provide some preliminary guidelines for recognizing when an early modern writer is making an unusual or meaningful paper selection, and discuss early modern terminology for various grades and types of writing paper.

Dr Heather Wolfe is Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. She has written on a wide range of topics in early modern manuscript culture and is the editor of the life and letters of Elizabeth Cary.

Monday 28 April 2014, Andrew Gordon (University of Aberdeen)
‘The Parish Clerk and the Parish Record in Early Modern London’
This paper will investigate the construction of the London parish register in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, examining the evidence of how it was kept and used, and exploring the changing status of the Parish Clerk in the period as part of a reconsideration of the status of the register as record.

Dr Andrew Gordon is Senior Lecturer in English and Co-Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Writing Early Modern London: Memory, Text and Community (Palgrave 2013) and co-editor of the collections Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England: Memorial Cultures of the Post-Reformation (2013) and Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (2001).

Monday 19 May 2014, William Poole (New College, Oxford)
‘Printed Books v. Manuscripts: Economies of Production and Economies of Reception’

Dr. William Poole is John Galsworthy Fellow and Tutor in English, and Fellow Librarian, New College, Oxford. He writes on early-modern intellectual history and bibliography and is co-editor of The Library.

Monday 26 May 2014, Julia Craig-McFeely (University of Oxford)
‘Lute Manuscripts and their Uses’
This paper will examine the corpus of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century lute manuscripts, looking at the reasons behind their compilation and the scribes responsible as well as, more broadly, at what these manuscripts reveal about the way in which musical instruments were taught in early modern England, who was playing them, and the purpose this skill served in social change and advancement.

Dr. Julia Craig-McFeely is Research Fellow at the Music Faculty, Oxford University. She is currently a Director of the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music and is an internationally renowned expert in digital manuscript imaging. In 2008 she was one of the team of specialists who undertook the pilot project to digitise the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem. Her doctorate on early modern lute manuscripts (1994), currently available online in an extended version, is a major contribution to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscript study and changed our understanding of the repertory that survives in these books.

Royal Society Centre for History of Science: Spring 2014 Lecture Series

Our spring 2014 programme of Friday lunchtime history of science lectures begins on 28 February. All the talks start at 1pm and last an hour; doors open at 12:30pm. All are welcome, and no advance booking is required.

A summary of the titles and speakers is given below; click on the dates for full details of each talk. If you have any questions or require further information, please email us – thanks.


28 February
Dr Julie McDougall-Waters and Dr Noah Moxham
(Re)Inventing science publishing: the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from the 17th to the 20th century


7 March
Professor Tom McLeish FRS, Dr Giles Gasper and Dr Hannah Smithson
The medieval science of light: uncovering meaning with an interdisciplinary methodology


14 March
Dr Mark Jervis
Robert Hooke's Micrographia: a biological cornucopia


21 March
Dr Christine Aicardi
Francis Crick: anti-vitalist activist


28 March
Professor Michael Hunter
The image of Restoration science: the frontispiece of Sprat’s History of the Royal Society


4 April
Georgina Ferry
Women’s work: Dorothy Hodgkin and the culture and craft of X-ray crystallography


11 April
Professor Hugh Pennington CBE
Staphylococcus aureus – biography of a bug sometimes super, most often not


25 April
Gillian Darley
Vesuvius: volcanic laboratory or miracle of divine intervention?


2 May
Professor Farah Mendlesohn
The Royal Society and science fiction


9 May
Dr Matthew Hunter
Experiments in paint: Reynolds, chemistry and the Royal Society



Rupert Baker
Library Manager
T +44 20 7451 2599

The Royal Society
6-9 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AG
royalsociety.org

Forum for European Philosophy Event: Ethics Matters in War

Thursday 13 February, 6.30 – 8pm
Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, LSE

Cecile Fabre, Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Oxford
Jeff McMahan, Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University

Chair: Gabriel Wollner, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow

The 100th Anniversary of the outbreak of World War I reminds us of the importance of ethics in war. Under what conditions may states wage war on each other? And what are the moral principles governing the conduct of war? Cecile Fabre and Jeff McMahanwill argue that traditional answers to these questions fail to convince: Traditional just war theory stands in need of revision and the role of ethics in war needs to be reconsidered.

Suggested hashtag for this event for Twitter users: #LSEwarethics

Podcasts of most FEP events are available online after the event. They can be accessed at www.philosophy-forum.org

All events are free and open to all without registration
For further information contact Juliana Cardinale: 020 7955 7539
J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk

Forum for European Philosophy
Cowdray House, Room G.05, European Institute
London School of Economics, WC2A 2AE
www.philosophy-forum.org

Forum for European Philosophy Event: European Provocation

Plato between the Teeth of the Beast: Animals and Democracy in Tomorrow’s Europe

Tuesday 11 February, 6.30 – 8pm
Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE

Richard Iveson, Research Fellow, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland

Chair: Danielle Sands, Visiting Lecturer, Department of English, QMUL and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow

How important are animals to the constitution of democracy? In constructing his famous Republic, Plato expressly warns of the dangerous link between the liberation of animals, the uprising of the proletariat, and the founding of democracy. Unwittingly, Plato alsoreveals that an increased ‘sensitivity’ towards the fate of bonded animals marks an essential first step towards a truly free society. From this starting point, Richard Iveson will consider whether the egalitarian entanglement of humans and other animals in fact constitutes the prior condition of any democratic community.

Suggested hashtag for this event for Twitter users: #LSEanimals

Podcasts of most FEP events are available online after the event. They can be accessed at www.philosophy-forum.org

All events are free and open to all without registration
For further information contact Juliana Cardinale: 020 7955 7539
J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk

Forum for European Philosophy
Cowdray House, Room G.05, European Institute
London School of Economics, WC2A 2AE
www.philosophy-forum.org

Philosophy@LSE Public Lecture: Justice in Finance

The academic staff in Philosophy@LSE (comprising the Forum for European Philosophy, the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, theCentre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences as well as cognate faculty in various departments) will present aspects of their research that are of interest to a general audience. Students, alumni and the public at large are invited to these public talks and to participate in the discussion.

Justice in Finance

Tuesday 4 February, 6.30 – 8pm
Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE

Gabriel Wollner, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow

Chair: Bryan Roberts, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow

There has recently been much debate among economists and politicians about the idea of levying a tax on particular transactions on international financial markets. Gabriel Wollner will contribute to the debate about international financial transaction taxation by bringing the perspective of political philosophy to bear on the politicians’ and economists’ arguments about policy. He will develop a framework for thinking about justice in finance and defend the idea of an international financial transaction tax as an instrument for making the international financial system more just.

Suggested hashtag for this event for Twitter users: #LSEjustice

Podcasts of most FEP events are available online after the event. They can be accessed at www.philosophy-forum.org

All events are free and open to all without registration
For further information contact Juliana Cardinale: 020 7955 7539
J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk

Forum for European Philosophy
Cowdray House, Room G.05, European Institute
London School of Economics, WC2A 2AE
www.philosophy-forum.org

Open University Book History Research Group: ‘Reading Records: The Commonplace Books of Francis Russell at Woburn Abbey’

Sebastiaan Verweij will be giving a paper entitled ‘Reading Records: The Commonplace Books of Francis Russell at Woburn Abbey’. Everyone is welcome, and there is no need to book in advance. More details below.

The topic for the series as a whole is Paper, Pen and Ink: Manuscript Cultures in Early Modern England and the full programme is at http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/english/book-history/paper-pen-ink.shtml For further information, please contact the series organiser, Jonathan Gibson (jonathan.gibson@open.ac.uk).

Monday 3 February 2014
: University of London, Senate House, Room 234 (2nd floor), 5.30-7.00pm

Sebastiaan Verweij (University of Oxford)

‘Reading Records: The Commonplace Books of Francis Russell at Woburn Abbey’

This paper will present and discuss the manuscript library of Francis Russell, fourth earl of Bedford. The purposes of the paper are two-fold. Firstly, it will draw attention to this important and under-studied collection of manuscripts and discuss both its bibliographical nature and the extent of its engagement with early-seventeenth century intellectual and political culture. Secondly, the paper will ask how such a varied and extensive collection of ‘reading records’ (notebooks, commonplace books,annotated manuscripts, and more) can contribute to the ways in which literary scholars and historians make sense of this period.

Dr Sebastiaan Verweij works at Oxford, where he is the Research Associate for the Oxford edition of the Sermons of John Donne. He has published on Scottish literary culture and manuscript studies, and works more generally on English and Scottish early modern literature and book history.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Early Modern Jarman

a Jarman 2014 event, 1 February 2014, Anatomy Theatre & Museum, King's College London

We invite proposals for papers (20 mins) on Jarman's adaptations of early modern texts and his deployment of historical figures and images in relation to: punk and the avant garde; national identity; politics and activism; sexuality/gender/desire; HIV/AIDS.

Keynote papers will be given by Jim Ellis (University of Calgary), Jeffrey Masten (Northwestern University) and Pascale Aebischer (University of Exeter). The conference includes admission to the “Pandemonium” exhibition in the Inigo Rooms (Somerset House East Wing), King's College London.

Expressions of interest should be sent to the organizers, Pascale Aebischer and Gordon McMullan, by 29 November 2013. Proposals from PhD students working in all appropriate fields (early modern studies, film studies, art history, etc.) are especially welcome.

The conference fee is £35 (waged) or £25 (unwaged).

Selected papers will be included in a special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin. Proposals of up to 300 words for 6000‐word essays should be sent to the special issue guest editor, Catherine Silverstone, by 8 November 2013.

For further information, see http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/shakespeare_bulletin/calls.html. The conference is hosted by the London Shakespeare Centre and supported by Shakespeare Bulletin and the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Exeter.