CALL for PAPERS Extension: Science in Culture. Technology, Mobility and Modernity in European Poetry and Cinema

Parliament Hall, South Street, St Andrews, KY16 9JU

31 March – 1 April 2017

The relationship between the sciences and the humanities is an area of studies that is in need of further research in the face of the continuous advancement and expansion of technology and science and their influences on the ‘happiness’ of society over the last two hundred years. Technology has certainly created tremendous opportunities for mobility, communication and wellbeing, eliciting enthusiastic responses as well as preoccupations across intellectual élites and society. In the 1830s Theophile Gaultier warned about the ‘end of books’ in connection with the development of technology and W.B. Yeats in the 1890s referred to ‘the man of science’ as ‘often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula’. On the other hand F. T. Marinetti promoted an exaltation of the technical and scientific progress in his 1909 Manifesto del futurismo.

In this international conference we would like to focus our attention on the interstice between sciences and humanities, two areas of knowledge that belong by default to different research paradigms. Inparticular we would like to debate the areas of interconnection and exchange of knowledge between the sciences and the humanities that are central in the advancement, creativity and innovation within society. We would like to do so by studying the mutual influences that technology, poetry and film have had during modernity at a European level.