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Literature, Medicine and Science: an interdisciplinary conference

When:
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

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10:00 – 10:25 | Informal Catch-up with Coffee and Tea (catered)

10:30 – 11:45 | Paper session 1: Forms and form

Anita Hoffmann – The birth of proprietary medicine advertising and bookseller vendor networks c.1630-1670

Caroline Curtis –  John Evelyn’s Pelicans: A Diary in Two Formats

Valentina Finger –  Taking in Shadows with a Glass: Natural-Magic Mirrors in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist

11:45 – 12:00 |  Short comfort break

12:00 – 13:15 | Paper Session 2: Women poets

Kate Allan –  ‘By a finite, see an infinite power’: Alchemical Metonymy in Hester Pulter’s Poems and Emblemes

Masuda Qureshi – ‘Sun amongst the Planets round’: philosophical metaphors of the universe in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies (1653)

Charlotte Newcombe – Atomic Form and Experiment in Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of De rerum natura

13:15 – 14:00 | Lunch Break (catered)

14:00 – 14:50 | Paper session 3: A world of words

Caroline Spearing – Science and Poetry in Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex (1668)

Virginia Ghelarducci –  José de Acosta: A Natural Philosopher? The Historia, the Aristotelian Tradition and the Wonders of the New World

14: 50 |  Short comfort break

15:00 – 15:50 | Paper session 4: Poetic innovation

Ivana Bicak –  Brains and Air-Pumps: Latin Poetry and Science in Early Modern England

Ayelet Langer –  Milton Aristotelian Motion

15:50 – 16:15 | Coffee and Tea Break (catered)

16:15 – 17:30 | Keynote lecture by Cassandra Gorman

‘Universal Verse: Anne Southwell and Early Modern Women’s Cosmological Poetics’

 

This is an in-person event and will not be recorded. 

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Speakers
  • Cassandra Gorman -

    Keynote expert.

  • Prof Sue Wiseman -

    Dr Masuda Qureshi is running this conference. She is ISSF fellow (postdoctoral) in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing.