The Science of Poetry: Crossing the arts/science divide in schools

This webinar will introduce resources on the poetry of famous scientist Sir Humphry Davy, developed through a collaboration between the Humphry Davy Notebooks Project at Lancaster University and STEM Learning. These resources are ideal for teachers to show the cross-curricular links between literacy and science and engage pupils who are much more interested in STEM than poetry. Aimed primarily at KS3 pupils but easily adapted to the needs of those in KS4, they are a valuable tool for developing the skills needed for the unseen poetry component of the GCSE exam.

Speakers:

Dr Rebekah Musk is a postdoctoral research assistant on the Davy Notebooks Project, who has also worked in school outreach and widening participation for Lancaster University’s department of English Literature and Creative Writing. As the communications officer of the British Society for Literature and Science she is passionate about interdisciplinary research and the benefits of studying English and science alongside one another.

Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism at Lancaster University. Her research explores the intersections between literature, science and medicine in the Romantic period. She is the author of many books and articles, including The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (2021) and Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s (2013), and is co-editor of The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy (OUP, 2020) in four volumes. She led The Davy Notebooks Project, an AHRC-funded, crowdsourced edition of Sir Humphry Davy’s notebooks (https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/collections/davy/1).

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The Davy Notebooks Project, with the help of over 3,800 volunteer transcribers, transcribed and annotated Sir Humphry Davy's (1778-1829) entire notebook collection on Zooniverse, the world's largest and most popular platform for people-powered research, between 2019 and 2024. Davy’s notebooks not only recorded his scientific experiments but also his poetry and other writings. Mostly unpublished during his lifetime, Davy’s poetry offers a fascinating insight into the links between science and poetry in the nineteenth century and challenges the idea of a rigid divide between science and the arts.

In light of this the Davy notebooks Project Team, led by Professor Sharon Ruston, have collaborated with STEM Learning to produce a comprehensive set of teaching resources for use in secondary schools which highlight Davy’s contribution to both science and literature.

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Project Acknowledgements:

The Davy Notebooks Project team gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in funding the full project (2021-24) through its Standard Research Grant scheme. The pilot project (2019) was funded through the AHRC's Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement scheme. The team also gratefully acknowledges additional funding received from the UCL STS Summer Studentship scheme and the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry's Subject Development Awards scheme.

The project uses data generated via the Zooniverse.org platform, development of which is funded by generous support, including a Global Impact Award from Google, and by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Finally, the project team gratefully acknowledges the cooperation and in-kind support of the Royal Institution in providing access to, and scanned images of, the Davy Notebooks in its collection.