CFP
University of Liverpool
October 31,2014
Deadline: September 1, 2014

Oliver Lodge was a defender of pure science, particularly in the modern university, yet he took a keen interest in how science might be applied throughout his career, taking out patents and setting up businesses.  This workshop, which will take place in the University of Liverpool’s Victoria Building, the opening of which Lodge attended in 1892, examines the distinction between pure and applied science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Speakers already confirmed include Di Drummond (Leeds Trinity), Bruce Hunt (University of Texas), Peter Rowlands (Liverpool), and Matthew Stanley (New York University).

The committee invites proposals for short papers (20 minutes) for a panel session at this one-day workshop.  Please send proposals (no more than 300 words) to <oliverlodgenetwork@gmail.com> by September 1, 2014.

Topics for discussion might include:

• Physics in the late nineteenth / early twentieth century
• The distinction between pure and applied science in the period
• Oliver Lodge as a scientist and / or engineer
• Intellectual property and science
• The place of science in the late nineteenth / early twentieth-century university
• The contested state of the ether in the science of the period
• The place of experiment / theory
• Scientific equipment and the role of the laboratory
• Lodge and Liverpool; Liverpool and science
• Science teaching in the late nineteenth / early twentieth century
• Science and spiritualism

This is the third in a series of workshops dedicated to Oliver Lodge organized by Making Waves: Oliver Lodge and the Cultures of Science, 1875-1940.  This AHRC-funded research network, led by James Mussell and Graeme Gooday, seeks to consider the life and legacy of Oliver Lodge as a way of understanding the place of science in culture, both in his period and our own.  See oliverlodge.org for further details.