(x-post hopos):

DARWIN'S MILLENIUM

An International multidisciplinary conference hosted by the School of
Research and Graduate Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of
Southampton July 3-5, 1998

This conference will examine the processes and effects of Charles
Darwin's 'dangerous' ideas from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.
Biologists, historians, literary critics, philosophers and
psychologists will discuss a wide range of topics including:
breeding, the nature of the 'human', literary interpretation and
scientific method, the progress of science, reductionism, relativism,
and cultural theory.

The Conference will launch a new faculty MA in Culture and History of
Science to start in September 1998.
Conference Organisers: Lucy Hartley and Cora Kaplan

contents:
Keynote Speakers
Programme Itinerary
Contact, booking and Registration

Keynote Speakers:
John Dupre
George Levine
James Moore
Adam Phillips
Harriet Ritvo

John Dupre
is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College and Senior Research
Fellow in the School of English and American Studies at Exeter
University. He has written extensively in the philosophy of science,
with particular emphasis on the questions science raises about ideas
of progress, unity, and cultural evolution. He is the author of The
Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of
Science and editor of The Latest on the Best.

George Levine
is Kenneth Burke Professor of Literature and Director of the Center
for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers
University. He has written extensively on Victorian literature and
culture, novel and narrative, science and culture, and Darwin. He is
the author of Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in
Victorian Fiction, The Realistic Imagination, and Lifebirds.

James Moore
is a Reader in History of Science at the Open University in Milton
Keynes. His research focuses mainly on Charles Darwin, but he is also
interested in 'science and religion' issues, evolutionary concepts of
nature and gender and the popularization of science. He is the author
of ThePost-Darwinian Controversies, co-author (with Adrian Desmond)
of the best-selling biography Darwin, the editor of History, Humanity
and Evolution and the editor of a sourcebook, Religion in Victorian
Britain.

Adam Phillips
is Principal Child Psychotherapist in the Wolverton Gardens Child and
Family Consultation Centre (formerly Charing Cross Hospital) and a
Member of the Guild of Psychotherapists. He is the author of On
Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, On Flirtation, and The Beast in
the Nursery.

Harriet Ritvo
is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at MIT. Her research
interests concentrate on British cultural history and environmental
history. She is the author of The Animal Estate: The English and
Other Creatures in the Victorian Age and coeditor of The
Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism,
Imperialism, Exoticism.

Provisional Programme

Please note: this programme is provisional until all speakers have
been confirmed. For the final version some speakers may be moved to
other panels in order to equalise numbers on each panel.

Friday 3 July
10.00-10.45 Registration & coffee
10.45-11.00 Welcome
11.00-12.30 Plenary: James Moore (Open University)
Seedlings, Chicks and Children: Darwin's Breeding Concern
12.30-13.45 Lunch
13.45-15.45 Session 1: Origins of Nature, Origins of Mind
...... session a
Stuart Harris (Sheffield) Empiricism in the Poetic Works of Erasmus
Darwin
Stephanie Volmer (Rutgers) Transatlantic Translations: Scientific
Practice in the Letters of John Bartram and Peter Collinson
Michael Roberts (Wrexham) The Early Geology, Theology and Illness of
Charles Darwin
...... session b
Lauren Golden (UEA) The Origin of Creativity: The Darwinian Brain
Gregory Radick (Cambridge) Evidence, Method and the Origins of
Language
Martin Counihan (New College, Southampton) Darwin's Bastard: Cosmic
Evolution from Tielhardto Tipler

15.45-16.15 Tea
16.15-17.45 Plenary: John Dupre (Birkbeck/Exeter)
Human Nature Since Darwin

18.00-20.00 Session 2: Reductionism, relativism & cultural theory
David Amigoni (Keele) Imitation of Life: Darwinism is Cultural
Keith Ansell Pearson (Warwick) Darwinism and Post-Biological
Evolution

20.30 Buffet supper

Saturday 4 July
09.30-11.30 Session 3: Investigations of the 'Natural' and the
'Human'
...... session a
Rebecca Stott (Anglia) Darwin's Barnacles
Megan Miranda (Soton) High Anxiety at the Border Crossing: Cultural
Hybridity in Dracula and Heart of Darkness

...... session b
Mathew Ratcliffe (Cambridge) Breaking the Great Chain of Belief
Gregory Dart (York) A Natural History of the City: Hazlitt, Lamb and
the Periodicals
Nadia Valman (Soton) Fugitive Pieces: A History of Descent?

11.30-12.00 Coffee

12.00-13.00 Plenary: Adam Phillips
Earthworms

1300-14.00 Lunch

14.00-16.00 Session 4: Literary forms of interpretation & scientific
method
Nick Baker (QMW) Darwinian Ideas of Natural Selection and Thomas
Carlyle's Method of History
Susan Bernstein (Wisconsin-Madison) 'A Web of Complex Relations':
Sensation & Evolution in Magazine Culture of the 1860s
Angelique Richardson (Birkbeck) When Science met Romance: Darwin and
the New Woman

16.00-16.30 Tea

16.30-18.00 Plenary: Harriet Ritvo (MIT)
Hybrids, Mongrels and the Construction of Difference

18.30-20.00 Drinks Reception

20.30 Conference Dinner


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Sunday 5 July
09.30-11.30 Session 5: Descent, discourse & the construction of
history
Suzy Anger (Maryland) Hermeneutics and Evolution
George Turner (Soton) The Best of all Possible Worlds?: Darwinian
Evolution does not always Produce Beneficial Solutions
Paul Sheehan (Birkbeck) Narrating the Animal: Metaphysical
Contingencies

11.30-11.45 Coffee
11.45-13.15 Plenary: George Levine (Rutgers)
The Uses of Darwin

13.15-14.15 Lunch

14.15-15.45 Closing Panel: The struggle for existence: literature vs.
science?
Isobel Armstrong, George Levine, Roger Luckhurst, James Moore,
Harriet Ritvo


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Contact details
Dr. Lucy Hartley:
Email: [log in to unmask]
Address: Dept. of English, University of Southampton, Southampton,
SO17 1BJ

Professor Cora Kaplan:
Email: [log in to unmask]
Address: see above


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for details of registration please contact:
Janet Jackson, Conference Secretary:
Email: [log in to unmask]
Address: Darwin's Millennium, Dept of English, University of
Southampton, S017 1BJ
Tel. no: 01703 593409
Fax no: 01703 592859


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