Areas of Study | Literary and Cultural Studies | Topical Areas of Emphasis

Faculty in this Area       

Noah Heringman
William Kerwin
Timothy Materer
Martha Patton
Thomas Quirk

Associated Faculty

Bill Allen
Stefani Engelstein
Theodore Koditschek
A. Mark Smith


Chalk Cliffs on Rügen
by Caspar David Friedrich
1818

Literature, Science and Medicine

One of the most exciting trends in contemporary academe is the growing movement toward interdisciplinary initiatives, particularly the initiative to bridge the widest gap of all - that between scientific and humanistic disciplines. A wide range of particular initiatives - from the new science and humanities journal Configurations to the wildly successful biennial conference on Literature and the Environment to scores of recent books and articles - testify to the growing importance of this trend.

Faculty Overview

Six MU English faculty are actively involved in research and teaching projects that link literature or rhetoric with scientific disciplines, including medicine. Several common threads unite these individual endeavors: the conviction that the aesthetic and imaginary are central to science, and that conversely, the dialogue or competition with science is essential to literature's claim on the real; the awareness that historically considered, literature is one integrated strand in a web of cultural production that extends to science, medicine, jurisprudence, and religion; and the strategy of using the history of science as a vital instrument for situating literature in its historical context.

The diversity of faculty in this area attests to the strength and flexibility of the methodology: the group includes a rhetorician, a Shakespeare scholar, a Romanticist, and several scholars working with nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.

Noah Heringman studies the literature and science of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural history and related disciplines. William Kerwin works on early modern medicine in relation to the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. For example, he will present "Plague Satire" at a 2008 Shakespeare Association seminar focused on "Shakespeare and the Plague." Timothy Materer focuses on the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath and James Merrill, but he occasionally offers courses on intersections between literature and science. Martha Patton specializes in the rhetoric of science and writing in the disciplines (particularly writing in biology and in engineering). Thomas Quirk works on science in the nineteenth-century American novel. Carsten Strathausen has joint appointments in English and German. He focuses mainly on the relationship between words and images from 1800 to the present with a strong interest in the history of science and the influence of technology on Western culture.

This group of faculty is keenly interested in working with students in all areas of literature to develop projects incorporating the history of science and medicine. One particular student is Brock Janssen, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in 2006 with majors in biology and English literature. He has long been fascinated by cultural responses to science, as well as by the cultural complications and problems that scientific discoveries often generate. Among his most recently discovered interests are biosemiotics and swarm intelligence.

Associated faculty

Bill Allen, in Agricultural Journalism, wrote for newspapers, magazines and wire services about science, the environment and other subjects. His book, Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica (Oxford University Press, 2001) is a blend of history, biology, politics and people written in a creative nonfiction style. Stefani Engelstein, in the Department of German and Russian, studies the relationships between anatomical science and English and German Romanticism. Theodore Koditschek, in the Department of History, focuses on British imperialism in the nineteenth century, but he is interested in intersections between history and science, especially questions about evolution and social Darwinism. A. Mark Smith, also in the History department, specializes in the history of science.

From 2003-2005, members of the literature, science, and medicine faculty met regularly with a campus-wide association for science and culture, a group that also includes faculty from Biological Sciences, German & Russian Studies, History, Physics & Astronomy, Romance Languages & Literatures, and the university hospital. This reading group, which welcomes graduate students, has read and discussed a wide range of works on the history, philosophy, and practice of science by Jonathan Marks, Bruno Latour, Richard Dawkins, Paul Feyerabend, and many others.

Course Offerings

Recent course offerings include several capstone courses: In 2007, Timothy Materer offered a course on Darwin and literature. Tom Quirk offered a capstone course focused on nineteenth-century literature and science. Stefani Engelstein has offered two courses recently: Sibling Incest and Literature and Monstrous Births: Nineteenth-century Tales of Creation. She plans to offer another course, Disciplining the Bodies (see below) in Spring 2008.

A few years ago, William Kerwin's seminar Staging the Humors, included an emphasis on early modern medicine, and Noah Heringman's The Romantic Landscape included an emphasis on early geology. M.A. students may also choose among upper-division undergraduate courses offered by faculty in the area. Several lower-division courses have also helped us to develop this specialization, and their popularity makes them good candidates for team-teaching with interested graduate students: Literature and Medicine; Literature and Science in Britain, 1700-1900; and Frauds, Hoaxes, and Pseudo-Science. These undergraduate courses have drawn pre-med students and students majoring in biochemistry, physics, engineering, veterinary medicine, science education, and other fields, as well as English majors. This interdisciplinary constituency makes for an invigorating classroom experience and augurs well for other interdisciplinary endeavors across campus.

Seminar Paper Projects in Literature, Science, and Medicine

2007

• Kath Athanassiou, "Evolution and Ethics: A Comparison of Wells, Golding, and Vonnegut"
• Brock Janssen, "Jameson Against Himself: The Dialectical Connections Between Information Overload and the _Political Unconscious_"
• Brock Janssen, "The Simulated Scientist: Turn of the Century Perceptions of Science and Henry Adams's Theory of History"
• Brock Janssen, "In Philip Sidney's Image: The Arts and Sciences of Representation in 'The Defense of Poesy' and 'Astrophil and Stella'"
• Nicole Pizzato, "Evolution of the Self and the Other: How Fiction Defines Humanity"

2006

• Irina Avkhimovich, "Gothic Ecology in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
• Travis Coleman, "Medical Techniques of the Lewis & Clark Expedition"
• Elizabeth Fletcher, "Ecology, Gender, Slavery in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion"

2004

• Sarah Angleton, "Species and Reproduction in Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden"
• Joshua Hagedorn, "'Images of Other Worlds Are There:' Conflicting Modes of Visual Representation in Wordsworth's Early Locodescriptive Poetry"
• Nadine Meyer, "Ideal and Real Bodies: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Anatomical Illustration"

Interdiscplinary Working Groups

Narrative and Healing

This group, a continuation and expansion of last year's group The Body Project, will consider a number of topics linked by the ways they hover around the edges of the medical and can be illuminated by the concept of "narrative." The Body Project focused on disability and the ways art has challenged some received ideas. This year's group will continue that line of thinking but also consider subjects such as disability, illness, and trauma, and the ways that narrative can help us reconfigure them. We have people interested in this gropu from theater, neuroscience, medicine, literature, social work, folklore, and film. Contact Bill Kerwin for more information.

Life Science and Society Program

The Life Science & Society Program (LSSP) is housed in the interdisciplinary Life Sciences Center at the University of Missouri. The LSSP runs an annual symposium.

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