Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science

Henry S. Turner

research, publications, teaching

Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science

Announcing a new series

Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science

In the past three decades, scholarship in literature, art history, philosophy, and the history of science has demonstrated the degree to which the humanities and the sciences remained entangled with one another: rather than “two cultures,” we find a long history of braided strands around shared problems and forms of representation. Today, emerging fields such as health humanities, environmental humanities, animal studies, new materialism, posthumanism, new media, and digital humanities demonstrate all the more vividly the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of knowledge and representation in the twenty-first century.

Alembics: Penn Studies in Literature and Science seeks to publish the very best work emerging at the many intersections between literature and science. The series will be inclusive of a broad historical range, publishing books on topics that span the medieval period to the future.

Rather than presuming two distinct, clearly defined domains of inquiry that borrow from one another—an older model in which literary authors were seen to invoke scientific themes and images, for instance, or in which scientific authors attempted to purge their writing of metaphor and other imaginative fictions—the series will instead focus on scholarship that shows us how “literary” and “scientific” modes of representation and methods of argument came to be constituted historically through a shared attention to common problems.

To submit a proposal to the series, please contact the series editors.

Series Editors:

Mary Thomas Crane
Thomas F. Rattigan Professor of English
Boston College

Henry S. Turner
Professor of English
Rutgers University

Editorial Advisory Board:

James Delbourgo
Associate Professor
History of Science and the Atlantic World
Rutgers University

Ursula K. Heise
Marcia H. Howard Chair in Literary Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Robert Markley
W. D. and Sarah E. Townbridge Professor of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Colin Milburn
Gary Snyder Chair in Science and Humanities
University of California, Davis

Robert Mitchell
Marcello Lotti Professor of English
Duke University

Kellie Robertson
Associate Professor of English
University of Maryland

Priscilla Wald
R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English
Duke University

Henry S. Turner