Episode 1 - What Even is Literature and Science?

Episode One: What even is Literature and Science?

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones

In the first episode of LitSciPod, hosts Laura and Catherine set out to define the field of Literature and Science, which is concerned with investigating and challenging the disciplinary boundaries between the study and practice of literature and that of science. They also tackle one of the most important issues in Literature and Science: how the classroom and the education reinforce these boundaries, often referred to colloquially as the “Two Cultures,’ after the title of C. P. Snow’s (in)famous Rede Lecture in 1959.

Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Rachel Crossland (@DrRCrossland, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chichester, whose book, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, was published in 2018 by the Oxford University Press. In addition to discussing the obstacles to the study of Literature and Science at university in the UK, Rachel also explores the personal connections that underpin the #litsci aspects of her research and teaching.

At the end of the episode, you can hear Rachel read Rebecca Elson’s poem, ‘Explaining Relativity.’

For further reading, Laura and Catherine recommend:

Crossland, Rachel. Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Oxford University Press. 2018.
Elson, Rebecca. A Responsibility to Awe. Carcanet Press. 2001.
Hayles, N. Katherine. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. Cornell University Press. 1984.
Sleigh, Charlotte. Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan. 2011.
Whitworth, Michael. Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford University Press. 2001.

About the hosts:

Laura’s research investigates the connections between technology, gender, politics, and aesthetics in the city in late-Victorian, Edwardian, and Modernist literature. Her current project, Reading London’s Lightscapes, 1880–1950, considers literary and cultural responses to the electrification of London at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Laura has worked as an educator at handful of museums and nature centres across Canada as well as at undergraduate and graduate level in Canada and the UK.

Catherine’s research interests lie in poetic form, how experimental/cognitive psychology can be read productively alongside literature and all things memory-related. She’s writing a book on memory in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, and has also published on memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction. More recently, Catherine’s been looking at how literary and scientific knowledge proliferated alike in the nineteenth century, and is researching mutual improvement and literary societies in nineteenth-century Wales. A former schoolteacher, she has a particular interest in questions concerning education.

We would love to hear what you think about our first episode, so if you have feedback, please email us at [email protected]