<![CDATA[European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts - News]]>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:31:01 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[CfP Conference 2025 - London, 4-6 June]]>Mon, 25 Nov 2024 23:44:34 GMThttps://www.slsa-eu.org/news/november-25th-2024We are happy to announce that the next conference of the SLSAeu will take place in London, from 4-6   June, 2025. 

THE LIFESPAN: Perspectives on Ageing and the Life Course from the Medical Humanities, the Health Sciences and Age Studies 

Webseite

Organisers:
Dr Aura Heydenreich (President SLSAeu), Dr Martina Zimmermann (SAACY Programme Lead) 
​]]><![CDATA[CfP: Literature and Science in the Public Sphere (31.03.25)]]>Mon, 07 Oct 2024 09:56:50 GMThttps://www.slsa-eu.org/news/cfp-literature-and-science-in-the-public-sphere-310325The journal Public Humanities invites submissions for the upcoming themed Issue Literature and Science in the Public Sphere, which will be Guest Edited by John Holmes, Jenni G Halpin, and Aura Heydenreich (President SLSAeu). The deadline for submissions is 31 March 2025.

Further details: CfP
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]]><![CDATA[BioCriticism Webinar on 26 April 2024 with Jerome de Root:                             The Biomolecularisation of the Archive]]>Sat, 20 Apr 2024 17:06:57 GMThttps://www.slsa-eu.org/news/biocriticism-webinar-on-26-april-2024-with-jerome-de-root-the-biomolecularisation-of-the-archiveBioCriticism webinar, 26/04, 2 pm CET

“The Biomolecularisation of the Archive”
Speaker: Prof. Jerome de Groot (University of Manchester)
Respondent: Prof. François-Joseph Lapointe (Université de Montréal)
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83685396506?pwd=ejZlcThMZGVKNXkyRHZXSkt1T0dCQT09
Meeting ID: 836 8539 6506
Passcode: 602541
Abstract: New genetic approaches to the material of the archive have wide implications for our conception of the past, our understanding of memory, and our broader sense of what historical information even is. Whilst historical data has regularly been developed and challenged, and historians use a breadth of information, my contention is that the accelerated development of huge datasets that are beyond the reach of ‘historians’ has the potential to transform the discipline. Set within (whilst also driving) a wider biomolecular turn in society, as cultural understanding of the past becomes genetically-informed, this change in the historical approach suggests a shift towards what I call ‘double helix history’.
Professor Jerome de Groot teaches at the University of Manchester. He is the author most recently of Double Helix History which looks at DNA and the past. He is currently working on new projects about FutureArchives and Biomolecular Humanities.  
Professor François-Joseph Lapointe is a biologist and bioartist (Université de Montréal).  As part of his research in biology, he is interested in phylogenetics, systematics, population genetics, and the human microbiome. As part of his interdisciplinary artistic practice, he draws inspiration from models of molecular biology and genetics.

​]]><![CDATA[CoSciLit in Asia Conference: Tokyo, 2 March 2024]]>Sat, 28 Oct 2023 21:57:41 GMThttps://www.slsa-eu.org/news/coscilit-in-asia-conference-tokyo-2-march-2024
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]]><![CDATA[Conference 2024: Birmingham, 10-12 April]]>Tue, 19 Sep 2023 15:33:22 GMThttps://www.slsa-eu.org/news/conference-2024-birmingham-10-12-aprilFor 2024, the annual conferences of the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSAeu), British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) and the biennial conference of the Commission on Science and Literature (CoSciLit), will be combined into a single meeting. This will be the first time that these three societies have joined together to share research at the many intersections of literature and science.

Further details: Website]]><![CDATA[Programme of the SLSAeu 2023]]>Mon, 01 May 2023 14:21:24 GMThttps://www.slsa-eu.org/news/programme-of-the-slsaeu-2023   https://www.slsaeu23.fau.de
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]]><![CDATA[SLSAeu Conference 2023: Erlangen (Germany), 18-21 May]]>Sun, 09 Oct 2022 11:40:28 GMThttps://www.slsa-eu.org/news/slsaeu-conference-2023-erlangen-18-21-mayWe are looking forward to receiving your proposals!

Call: CfP - deadline: 15 January 2023

Topic:
Models, Metaphors and Simulations: Epistemic Transformations in Literature, Science and the Arts

Speakers:
- Amy Kind, Claremont McKenna College, California
- Roman Frigg, London School of Economics, London
- Jean Marie Schaeffer, École des Hautes Études et Sciences Sociales Paris

Site Chairs:
Aura Heydenreich & Klaus Mecke, Erlangen (ELINAS)

]]><![CDATA[SLSAeu Conference 2021: online, 4-5 March]]>Sat, 13 Feb 2021 10:54:46 GMThttps://www.slsa-eu.org/news/slsaeu-conference-2021-online-4-5-marchProgramme - access to papers and discussion for active participants only so far:
https://posthumanism2021.wordpress.com/program/
]]><![CDATA[SLSAeu 2021 - Bergen, 4-7 March: Literary & Aesthetic Posthumanism]]>Sun, 05 Jul 2020 12:30:19 GMThttps://www.slsa-eu.org/news/slsaeu-2021-bergen-4-7-march-literary-aesthetic-posthumanismTopic 2021: Literary and Aesthetic Posthumanism

The 2005 Chicago meeting of the International Society for Literature, Science and the Arts was notable, in the first instance, for its addition of the ‘Arts’ into the organization’s ongoing conversations. Equally notable, on this occasion incoming scholars Stefan Herbrechter, Ivan Callus, Manuela Rossini, and Neil Badmington offered an influential panel on Critical Posthumanism, which started the transatlantic dialogue of the posthuman condition and posthumanist theory between the SLSA and what is now the SLSAeu, the European sister organization (founded in 2010, with its first meeting being held in Riga, in 2012 on the topic of “textures”).
Bearing in mind these literary and aesthetic roots, our upcoming meeting in Bergen calls for papers that revisit concepts and consiliences in literature, science, and aesthetics. While we welcome approaches that recognize the literal, material changes in literature and arts in a digital age, we hope also to continue and advance discussions of inherent uncertainties, along with possibilities that are more cognitive than instrumental. We will be featuring, in both our panels and an accompanying art exhibit, enactments of complex human-technical assemblages in which cognition and decision-making powers are distributed in both aesthetic and literary systems – what N. Katherine Hayles would call “cognitive assemblages” and what Laura Shackelford and Louise Economides call “surreal entanglements.” Shackelford and Economides have been focusing, of late, on the work of Jeff Vandermeer; Hayles, most recently on Tom McCarthy, Peter Watts, and Colson Whitehead. But there are many other emerging authors, artists, and cross-disciplinary practitioners who embed the self in a determinedly object oriented, multiply mediated yet nonetheless cognitive environment.
One outcome of the 2021 SLSAeu gathering might be the identification of an emerging aesthetic and literary practice: one that is not so much newly experimental, avant, generic, or innovative, but part of an emerging, environmental and systems framework that is not containable by these essentially Humanist dispositions. While continuing the general integration of literary studies with science and the arts, we will also welcome critical artistic interventions. Among the questions and topics we hope to address in multiple, themed panels (and gallery exhibits) are these:
  • the potentiality of artistic works as critical interventions.
  • is it possible, after so many ‘posts,’ to redefine the range and sequencing of literary and cultural periods? Is posthumanism, as such, more consistent with epic than the modern novel? Is orality making a comeback in born digital performances, moving literature away from the Humanist print paradigm and Gutenberg parenthesis?
  • does the concatenation of image, sound, and text within constructed, and variously constrained digital environments offer a more performative literary experience?
  • given the marginality of print literature among current media (for example, the high-bandwidth illusionism of the audiovisual, or the economization of unequally shared data), is literature still a place for critical thought and reflection? A place where our media can be brought to consciousness and our critical blind spots brought to light?
  • along with a critical posthumanism, can we identify the critical ecologies of our own time – in all senses of the word ‘critical’? In this conference, we hope to extend the long-running interest in ecosystems that now combine technological media and biological life forms.
  • how do our notions of authorship and audience change when literary and aesthetic works are circulating in networks? when authors are collaborating, and at times thinking with inhuman, programmable operators?
  • can born-digital, electronic literature be more conducive than print to an emergent, literary posthumanism? Can the stability of print, its slowness and seriality that once could support critical conversations over the long term, be carried over into the more labile, electronic media environment? Or is e-lit at present caught within the unreflectively communicative uses to which high-bandwidth, hyperreal media are generally put?
    The present conference seeks also to impart some contours to what is by now a widespread posthumanist practice in contemporary literary arts – whether we end up regarding such work as a genre (one among many) or something more like a generalizable, posthumanist condition. And if it turns out, that the ‘posthuman’ is already a dominant strain in contemporary literature, would ‘we’ be able to know that?
    Submission Guidelines
    Proposals: abstracts up to 500 words should be send by email to Bruno Ministro (brunosantos4[at]gmail.com). Please include “SLSAeu21” in the email subject line. We are requesting these by 1 August, with a response in early October.
    Venue
    The conference will be held in Bergen, Norway.
    Organization
    Co-hosts: University of Bergen and University of Basel
    Conference chair: Joseph Tabbi (U. of Bergen)
    SLSAeu is the sister organization of the international, USA-based Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. It welcomes colleagues in the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, all fields of science, medicine, engineering, computer sciences as well as independent scholars, artists and scientists. https://www.slsa-eu.org/ 

]]><![CDATA[SLSAeu 2020: Anthropocenes]]>Sun, 05 Jul 2020 12:20:54 GMThttps://www.slsa-eu.org/news/slsaeu-2020-anthropocenesDue to the corona restrictions on travelling and meeting, the 2020 conference took place on a virtual platform. We thank ANIA MALINOWSKA (University of Silesia in Katowice) for taking on this challenge and providing us with a fantastic event and exhibition. Thank you also to all the contributors and the team!
You can still access the talks and artwork on this site until April 202 at a cost of €30. Accesss via:
http://anthropocenes2020.com

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