Science and Literature Across History

22 novembre 2025

Kilian Schindler

Dr. Kilian Schindler, UNIFR

Dr. Honor Jackson, UNIFR

Prof. Kristen Poole, University of Delaware

This CUSO event would explore the ways literature across history presents and mediates the relationship between science and philosophy / theology, and reflect on scholarly methodologies for approaching topics that transcend historiographic boundaries. We plan to invite Professor Kristen Poole to give a lecture on her current book project, which focuses on Philip Pullman's contemporary trilogies, His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust, and their relationship with John Milton's Paradise Lost and seventeenth-century science, language and religion. We would also invite her to run a workshop focused on practical methodological advice when working across historical periods and particularly across large temporal gaps, drawing on work in the edited collection she co-edited with Owen Williams, Early Modern Histories of Time: The Periodizations of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), which historicised historical epistemologies in order to re-evaluate the very concepts of periodisation and, indeed, history. As well as directly engaging all attendees in important scholarly debate both about the interconnected topics of science and religion in literature and reflecting on our own conceptions or misconceptions of chronology (topics which have cross-period and inter-disciplinary appeal), this workshop would also offer opportunities to three doctoral students to present papers and to receive feedback on their current work from Professor Poole, the organisers, and their peers. Rough schedule: 09.30 – 10.00 – Coffee 10.00 – 10.10 – Welcome 10.10 – 11.30 – Workshop on cross-period research 11.30 – 11.50 – Coffee break 11.50 – 13.00 – Lecture and Q&A 13.00 – 14.30 – Lunch 14.30 – 16.00 – Doctoral stud

UNIFR

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