News

To finish the AHRC and Wellcome Trust-funded The Memory Network with a flourish, they are organising a major international conference, The Story of Memory, on 4 and 5 September, 2014.

The conference poses new questions about the relationship between the senses, cognition, memory, and emotion, and explores the return to a critical investigation of storytelling in the twenty-first century.

The conference will showcase a group of keynote speakers that reflects the cross-disciplinary spirit of the project: Yale’s noted cognitive psychologist Paul Bloom will talk about the relationship between the senses and memory, narratologist Mark Currie (Queen Mary) will speak on memory and temporality; cognitive psychologist Martijn Meeter (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) will provide a provocative thesis on narrative interventions in trauma; and anthropologist Jamie Tehrani (Durham) will talk about his novel approach to folk tales.

In conjunction with the conference, The Memory Network is also organising a literary festival on 6 September headlined by Ian McEwan, who will be in conversation with Paul Bloom. The MIT neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin, author of Permanent Present Tense, will give us a unique tour through the life and brain of the amnesiac H.M. Other participants include A. L. Kennedy, Naomi Alderman and Anna Stothard. Further names will be announced soon.

Please visit The Memory Network website for more information.

Series of short films launched that showcase research innovation at the intersections of Sciences and the Arts and Humanities

The AHRC Science in Culture Theme is delighted to launch a series of short films produced as part of an Ignite event held at the Natural History Museum on Wednesday 26th March.

Science in Culture Ignite 2014 was an opportunity for Early Career researchers, working at the intersections of Sciences and the Arts and Humanities, to present their research in 5 minutes. Speakers addressed a wide range of topics from data visualisation to art therapies, avant garde technologies and how we interact with animals.

The Ignite format is a demanding one (5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide) that requires the very best communication skills. It is also a uniquely engaging format allowing an audience to get short and engaging insights into a range of different research projects. Short films of all fourteen presentations are available to watch here.

An introductory film, produced at the event, provides an insight into the AHRC Science in Culture Theme and also introduces the 3 Large Grant projects funded as part of the Theme: Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the Nineteenth and Twenty-first Centuries; Cultural and Scientific Perceptions of Human- Chicken Interactions and Rethinking the Senses: Uniting the Philosophy and Neuroscience of Perception.

Professor Barry C Smith, AHRC Leadership Fellow for the Science in Culture Theme commented ‘The Science in Culture Ignite event exceeded our expectations. It was a powerful example of how well one can present an idea in five minutes; what we got was the essence of the research. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from these Early Career Researchers in the future.’

The theme for the 3rd World Humanities Forum, which will be held in Korea from 30 October – 1 November 2014, is ‘Humanities in the Era of Transformative Science and Technology’.

There is currently an open call for papers related to the following topics:

• Human life in cyber society
• “Post-human” mind and body
• Biologism and humanism
• The Humanities in the era of scientific/technological revolution
• Revisiting humanistic critique of science and technology
• Future-orientated interaction between science and humanities

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 10th May 2014. Papers on other topics may also be accepted as well.

Further information about the event and the call for papers is available on the National Research Foundation of Korea website

A 13th Century Bishop’s theory about the evolution of the Universe has been shown to have parallels with modern ideas of multiple universes, according to AHRC funded researchers from Durham University.

The Ordered Universe Project, which brings together physicists, psychologists, cosmologists, Latin experts and medieval historians, has been studying the texts of Robert Grosseteste, one-time Bishop of Lincoln.

The team, partly funded by the AHRC Science in Culture Theme, created a fresh Latin translation before applying modern mathematical and computational techniques to Grosseteste’s equations.

Their latest research paper, published today in the Royal Society Journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society A, is entitled “A medieval multiverse?: Mathematical modelling of the thirteenth century universe of Robert Grosseteste”.

Grosseteste’s treatise De Luce (meaning “Concerning Light”), written in 1225, describes a Universe created via a Big Bang-like explosion of light before forming into a series of nine celestial spheres.

The full article is available here http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/470/2167/20140025.abstract

One week on from our successful AHRC Science in Culture Theme Ignite event at the Natural History Museum we’re delighted to share our Storify of the event. Were you there? Let us know what you thought of #ScIgnite2014

The AHRC Ordered Universe project and associated Science in Culture Theme research network ‘The Works of Robert Grosseteste: Lost Legacies and the Living Past’ has been the subject of a number of recent articles.

The project, based at the University of Durham, brings together cosmologists and medievalists to investigate the writings of Robert Grosseteste, a 13th century English theologian and Bishop.

The project was featured in a Comment piece and Podcast in Nature entitled ‘History: A Medieval Multiverse’

The research was also the focus of an article ‘Medieval Cosmology meets Modern Mathematics’  in Science News.

In addition the full scientific analysis of Grossesteste’s De Luce– On light will be published in Proceedings of the Royal Society in the next month.

The project has been featured in several blog including Arxiv, Ciencias M1XTAS and Slashdot well as on the AHRC Science in Culture Theme website.

A vacancy for a Postdoctoral research assistant in ‘Science Periodicals, Publishing and Communication’ is currently being advertised as part of the AHRC Science in Culture Theme Large Grant ‘Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries’ .

This post will be based both at Oxford, working with Professor Shuttleworth, and in London, at the Royal Society. It will have a broad remit in relation to the three strands of the project (19th-century science periodicals, citizen science, and contemporary science publishing) with particular responsibility for public engagement activities, and research on contemporary science publishing, and developments in citizen science. The RA will be given an office in St Anne’s College, and workspace at the Royal Society, and will be expected to divide their time between the two institutions.

The post will form part of a larger team working on ‘Constructing Scientific Communities’, in conjunction with colleagues based at the University of Leicester, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Society and the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.

The post is fixed-term for 36 months, and will start on 1 September 2014. Applicants must have a PhD or DPhil in a relevant area, possess strong communication skills and be willing to participate in the running of the project. The appointee will be based at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

For further information about this opportunity and to submit an application, please visit the University of Oxford recruitment website

Come and join us for an afternoon of IGNITE talks at the National History Museum on Wednesday 26th March 2014. This FREE event is open to members of the public. Please register for a ticket through Eventbrite.

Who can attend?
This FREE event is open to everyone.

Professor Colin Blakemore appeared on BBC Radio 4, Start the Week, on Monday 10th February to discuss his AHRC Large Grant ‘Rethinking the Senses’ awarded as part of the Science in Culture Theme.

Colin Blakemore described the project, which brings together Philosophers, Experimental Psychologists and Neuroscientists to explore questions of perception. He commented that:

‘This is just one example of what I think will be an increasing trend in the relationships between Humanities and Sciences- areas of interaction and common interest but different languages’.

He also noted that the question of the senses was an area that was ‘ripe for proper discourse and discussion’ since it is an example where genuine interaction between Philosophy and Science is taking place.

A full recording of this programme is available here. Further information about the ‘Rethinking the Senses’ Large grant is on the project website  http://www.thesenses.ac.uk/