Conversations Across the Creek | Creators of Culture: Scientists in Australian Fiction

Conversations Across the Creek is an initiative by the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) and the Research School of Chemistry (RSC) to provide a space for continuing dialogue among scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars. Meetings are held monthly, with the aim of stimulating and unearthing research and teaching collaborations across the university.

Join us for this special event in our 'Conversations Across the Creek' series. The topic of this event is Creators of Culture: Scientists in Australian Fiction.

What makes a scientist in Australian fiction? How are fictional Australian scientists depicted in the relationship to the land? What aesthetic narrative techniques does literature use to represent, (re)configure and stage these?

This workshop aims to:

•Identify and analyse fiction dealing with scientists and Australia
•Help to outline what makes a scientist in fiction. This will affect our contemporary understanding of the connections between scientific research and the creative imagination. The workshop thus promotes the idea that literature holds a place in the centre of intellectual debate in ‘the age of science’, and it will enable crucial disciplinary research contributions to continuing discussions about the division of science and the humanities into ‘two cultures’.
•Enable improved understanding of culture through the fiction that represents it: Elucidate how the discourse of (fictional) scientific quest and knowledge became part of the discourse of Australian identity.

Special guest
Peter Goldsworthy

Speakers include

Dr Rebecca Hendershott
School of Archaeology and Anthropology, ANU

Associate Professor Elizabeth Leane
Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania
Professor Leane's bio here.

Please register - light lunch provided. Click here for more information about the CatC Series, or to access recordings of past events.