Past Events › Lunar Lecture Series
Lectures held on the night of the full moon
February 2023
The Notebooks of Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) by Professor Sharon Ruston
Tickets now available for zoom option only. This first Lunar Lecture of 2023 will explore the notebooks of the early nineteenth-century chemist Sir Humphry Davy, best known for his miners’ safety lamp, known as the Davy lamp. Professor Sharon Ruston is leading a research council funded project to transcribe all of Davy’s 75 surviving notebooks, which reveal that he wrote poetry as well as science: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/humphrydavy/davy-notebooks-project/. After discussing Davy’s career and life briefly, and considering the notebooks as a…
Find out more »March 2023
The Linguistics of Humour by Dr Alice Haines
Humour plays a big part in how we communicate with each other and is an important way in which we form and maintain relationships. In this lecture I will draw on some key ideas in linguistics to explore how the language of comic literature interacts with our knowledge of the world. This in turn enables us to develop relationships with narrators and characters, and to find amusement (or not!) in what they say and how they say it. Alice Haines…
Find out more »June 2023
Lunar Lecture – ‘A short, fat little democrat’ and a pioneering doctor, scientist and poet: Thomas Beddoes and the legacy of the Lunar Society by Professor Tim Fulford
Thomas Beddoes was Erasmus Darwin’s self-appointed protege: he, like Darwin welcomed revolutions — whether the French Revolution in politics, the revolution in geology that showed the earth was millions of years old, or the revolution in chemistry that discovered oxygen. In the 1790s, he set up the world’s first scientific research institute — the Pneumatic Institution -- in Bristol. Funded by Darwin and his Lunar Society friends the Wedgwoods, the Watts and James Keir, it aimed to create a revolutionary…
Find out more »September 2023
Lunar Lecture – “I congratulate you on your being on the road to happiness”
"I congratulate you on your being on the road to happiness" Darwin writing to Beddoes in 1794 A talk on Darwin and his connections with friends of the Beddoes and Edgeworth families and Lunar Society members. For the last 40 years John Beddoes has been collecting information for a biography on Anna Beddoes (née Edgeworth), the wife of Dr Thomas Beddoes, who was a close friend and confidant of Dr Erasmus Darwin. The talk will include a review of over twenty personal letters between the two Doctors and will take a close look at Darwin's…
Find out more »November 2023
Lunar Lecture – The Poetics of Romantic Ecology: Erasmus Darwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley by Dr Amanda Blake Davis
In a well-known botanical poem, The Sensitive-Plant, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley draws upon the eroticised, emotive plants of Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants, where Darwin's 'chaste mimosa' gives rise to Shelley's loveless 'sensitive-plant'. In the lesser known 'Unfinished Drama', a mysterious 'magic plant' grows, snake-like, muddling the categories of plant and animal. Centring on these two poems, this talk will explore Shelley's ecological poetics through his interrelationship with Darwin. Tickets available here
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