LitSciPod: The Literature and Science Podcast LitSciPod

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)