Creative Encounters: Humanities and the Sciences

Speaker: Sally Shuttleworth

Venue: Room 404, East No.1B Teaching Building, Zijingang Campus

Abstract: Can the Humanities and Sciences collaborate in fruitful ways? What is to be gained by breaking through disciplinary boundaries? And can Humanities research have impact outside the field of academia? This lecture seeks to answer some of these questions by looking at some of the research activities involved in a couple of large projects I have directed. The first, “Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries,” funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, was run in conjunction with the Royal Society, the Natural History Museum, London, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England, as well as the world’s largest online Citizen Science platform, Zooniverse. It involved working with astrophysicists, medical professionals, botanists, mathematicians, vulcanologists and museum staff. The second project, “Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives,” funded by the European Research Council, involved working with psychiatrists and epidemiologists, as well as theatre companies, and projection artists. The talk will consider the rewards, and also the challenges, of such work, and also the possibilities opened up for the Humanities by citizen science.