Veranstaltung: Darwin our Contemporary - International Conference - 27.11.-28.11.2009
Darwin our Contemporary –
Re-Imaginations and Medializa-tions of Darwin and Cultures of Neo-Darwinian Ideas: A Bicen-tennial Symposium
Siegen University, Artur-Woll-Haus, 27 - 28 November, 2009
We live under the rule of a “biocracy” (Wolfgang Lipp). Biology and the life sciences have at-tained an enormous power of discourse in recent years, particularly since the decoding of the human genome and other advances in the field of genetic engineering. In view of this recent trend towards “gene centrism” (John Dupré 2003), the conference will offer a platform for a cultural and media-anthro¬pologi¬cal analysis of the contemporary medialization of post-Darwinian bio-determinism as well as neo-determinist and neo-Darwinist culture, literature and art. We ask how naturalism, determinism and Darwinism – the eugenics of the 19th century and the genetic coding of the 20th century as well as their conceptual clusters – are positioned, em-bodied and staged in various media configurations and media genres and how particular media apparatuses have formed, displaced or stabilized virulent percep¬tions, collective symbols and patterns of attitude, i. e. various concepts of humankind.
The conference focuses on biographic or meta-biographic media texts, which deal with Darwin, Mendel and other evolutional biologists and geneticists. Additionally, the project is concerned with neo-Darwinist, bio-poetic and bio-aesthetic media texts, which e.g. became known in literary studies under the name of Literary Darwinism (Joseph Carroll, Sloan and Gottschall). The conference also deals with Darwin's texts, building on Gillian Beer's theoreti-cal founda¬tions concerned with Darwin's em¬bedding in Victorian emplotments and on the newest research, for instance, concerned with the role of visualization in the circulation of Darwin's ideas (Jonathan Smith 2008, Julia Voss 2007). It will aim at establishing and assessing the role of Darwin and cultural per¬formances of his life and work in the context of the domi-nant positions of current bio-poetical research into ‘literary Darwinism’.
Conference speakers include: David Amigoni (Keele), Anna Barton (Keele), Dietmar Böhnke (Leipzig), Julika Griem (Darmstadt), Ann Heilmann (Hull), Anja Müller-Wood (Mainz), Monika Pietrzak-Franger (Siegen), Angelique Richardson (Exeter), Angela Schwarz (Siegen), Eckart Voigts-Virchow (Siegen), Nils Wilkinson (Siegen).
Contact: pietrzak@anglistik.uni-siegen.de