Anglophone Cultures and History: Science and Culture

Description

Due, in part, to the growing interest in projects involving the relationships between Life Sciences and Social Sciences, the activities of this strand will address and foster the examination of the multiple links between Science and the Humanities from an intercultural perspective. On the one hand, the scientific method (empirical) has frequently been employed in humanistic studies, whilst scientific themes have always inspired poets, novelists, artists and film directors. On the other, scientists often make use of narrative discourse or visual techniques to disseminate their new discoveries. Thus the research members will confront and compare scientific and humanistic discourses also studying the different strategies employed in the representation, dissemination and popularisation of science, particularly in fictional narratives as well as in the Arts, attempting, in this way, to establish how far the comparison of different forms of discursivity can contribute towards the study of the history of science, visual culture and literature, in nineteenth, twentieth and twentieth-first-century Anglophone countries. The members of the Project group have therefore  begun to raise  certain issues for discussion: will the future of the Humanities depend inevitably upon an approximation to Life Sciences? What will be  the role of specialists in Social and Human Sciences in the interpretation, understanding and dissemination of scientific  discoveries ? What are the advantages of the inclusion of the Humanities in scientific debates and of the inclusion of Science in debates on Literature and  Visual Culture?