Conecta.

We are now in a golden age for science in entertainment. Academy Award winning films such as   Gravity   and   The Theory of Everything , and television ratings titans like  The Big Bang Theory  have proven that science–based entertainment products can be both critically acclaimed and financially successful. In fact, many high profile scientific organizations including the US National Academy of Sciences and the Wellcome Trust in the UK now believe that science communication can, and perhaps should, be both informative and entertaining. These groups have embraced movies and television as legitimate vehicles for science communication by developing initiatives to facilitate scientific involvement in the production of films and television programs. Science communication scholarship on entertainment media has been slow to catch up with the enthusiasm shown by these scientific organizations, as science communication studies of science in mass media still predominant...

Please find below details of a conference in medical humanities I am organising in Leicester (apologies for cross-posting). When is Death?: Three Day International Conference This three day international and interdisciplinary conference will focus on the question ‘When is Death?’ Keynote speakers include: Professor Douglas Davies, Professor Thomas W. Laqueur, Dr John Robb, Associate Professor Sarah Ferber, Jonathan Ree, Dr Julie-Marie Strange When is Death?: Three Day International Conference People tend to instinctively think of death as something that is certain and absolute, a one-way journey away from the world of the living. Where people in the medieval period saw Death striking the hour in public clocks, people in the twenty-first century can now log on to The Death Clock, which estimates our remaining time alive – down to the hours, minutes, and seconds. Can we think of death as a becoming rather than an ending? Whether we think of death as an event, as a state, or as a movement...

Epistolary cultures - letters and letter-writing in early modern Europe Call for papers The University of York is pleased to announce Epistolary cultures - letters and letter-writing in early modern Europe, a two-day conference (Humanities Research Centre, 18-19 March 2016).   From the place of Cicero’s intimate letters in the development of Renaissance humanism, to the knowledge networks of merchants, collectors and scientists, to the role of women in the republic of letters, recent years have seen a flowering of studies on the practice of letter-writing in Early Modern Europe, as well as major editing projects of early modern letters - Hartlib, Comenius, Scaliger, Casaubon, Browne, Greville, and the EMLO and Cultures of Knowledge projects. This conference will explore the manifold aspects of early modern letter-writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in its Latin and vernacular forms. It will consider topics such as the intellectual geographies of letter-wri...

The Birkbeck History, Classics and Archaeology Department is pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded three-year doctoral grant to work on a project that falls within the scope of Professor Daniel Pick's five year senior investigator award, entitled ‘Hidden Persuaders? Brainwashing, Culture, Clinical Knowledge and the Cold War Human Sciences, c. 1950-1990’. The doctoral studentship will be supervised by Professor Daniel Pick and is funded by the Wellcome Trust. It includes some travel funds to attend conferences and consult key archives abroad. The team consists of the principal investigator, two post-doctoral researchers and three doctoral students as well as visiting scholars. Further details of the project and its various research strands can be found on the Hidden Persuaders website http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/ and an online profile of Professor Daniel Pick and the project http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/06/30/research-spotlight-prof-daniel-...

'Domesticating the Sumerians in Mandate Iraq: contextualising Woolley's excavations at Ur (1922-1934)' Applications are invited for a doctoral studentship tenable at University College London (UCL) History Department, in collaboration with the British Museum (BM). This doctoral award is funded though the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under its Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships scheme. The project will be co-supervised by Professor Eleanor Robson at UCL, and Dr Jonathan Taylor at the BM. UCL Department / Division: History Duration of Studentship: Three Years (to start 01 October 2015) Stipend: £16,413 per annum (rate as at 2014/15 session) Studentship Description The successful candidate will explore the motivations and methods in Middle Eastern archaeology at the nexus of the infancy of modern, scientific archaeology and the birth of the modern nation state of Iraq, and the lasting impact of these excavations on public understanding of the past. T...

Call for Papers SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGIES AND MATERIAL CULTURE IN THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION Annual Conference of the History of Education Society (UK) Liverpool Hope University 20 th -22 nd November 2015 Confirmed keynote speakers Professor Ruth Watts, Emeritus Professor of History of Education, University of Birmingham Dr Claire Jones, Teacher and Honorary Fellow, University of Liverpool Jonathan Reinarz, Professor of the History of Medicine, University of Birmingham Too often the history of science and technology and the history of education have been written at a remove from each other despite being intimately connected. It is an important aim of this conference to bring these two significant and related areas of historiography into closer dialogue with one another. While we welcome papers which examine theoretical, methodological and historiographical aspects of the relationship between science, technologies and education, we are equally keen for sp...

Dear all, The 2015 call for submissions for our Computer History Museum book prize is online at http://sigcis.org/chmprize and pasted below. Please spread the word. Also remember that there is a three year window. This window this year is for books with first publication in English in 2012, 2013, or 2014. We are particularly glad that Joy Rankin has agreed to join the jury this year. Please address any questions to this year’s chair, Joseph November. Best, David Nofre ***** Computer History Museum Prize The Computer History Museum Prize is awarded to the author of an outstanding book in the history of computing broadly conceived, published during the prior three years. The prize of $1,000 is awarded by SIGCIS, the Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society. SIGCIS is part of the Society for the History of Technology. In 2012 the prize was endowed in perpetuity through a generous bequest from the estate of Paul Baran, a legend...