Darwin-Butler Conference, Cambridge, 1-2 July
Registration is still possible for the Conference:
'The Shared Cultural Milieu of Charles Darwin and Samuel
Butler: Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century'
Monday 1st - Tuesday 2nd July, in the Divinity School, St
John's College Cambridge.
This conference will extend the discussion of Darwin's
reception in Europe, published in two volumes as *The Reception of Charles
Darwin in Europe* (2008) in the well-established Series on the Reception of
British and Irish Authors in Europe (Bloomsbury) as well as in the third
volume, 'The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe'
(forthcoming 2014).
It will consider
not only Darwin's impact on culture, especially literary culture, but also the
milieu in which writers like Darwin and Butler could emerge from very similar
educational and cultural backgrounds and contribute to both literature and
science. Through our work on the European reception, a new focus on the
channels and modes of understanding of Darwin’s work emerges, in which Butler's
contributions to the subject not only in his controversies with Darwin but
through his translations and his five books on evolution enrich our
understanding of the Continental reception and of new sciences emerging from
the Darwinian controversies.
St John's College houses the Butler Collection, the
largest collection of his works, letters, notebooks, paintings, and photographs
in one place, and recently received a Heritage Lottery Grant to make Butler's
work better known to a wider public. In the past two years the Collection has
been fully catalogued and a number of exhibitions, events and lectures, open to
the public as well as to the University, have been held. A small Butler
exhibition will be mounted in the Divinity School for the conference.
A number of younger scholars have come forward who are
doing new research on Butler, especially in the context of his scientific
ideas. A feature of the conference will be a seminar presenting this new work,
at which James Paradis (MIT), editor of *Samuel Butler: Victorian Against the
Grain* (Toronto 2007), will be present. Another feature will be the
contributions of writers who themselves have explored the links between science
and literature in their own work, and the talented young poet Emily Ballou will
give a reading on the first evening.
Registration (incl. lunch) costs £60 per person per day;
£40 for full-time students.
Rooms can be also booked for those wishing to stay
overnight in the College.
You can download the programme at http://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/rbae/Programme_and_registration.pdf
and register by writing to us at rbae2011@gmail.com
Dr Elinor Shaffer FBA and Professor Thomas F. Glick,
co-editors, The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe Dr
Mark Nicholls, Fellow and Librarian, St John’s College Conference co-organizers