CELLS Seminar: Professor Sharon Ruston "The Davy Notebooks Project, 2019-24"

Since 2019, 3841 volunteers from around the world helped transcribe 11,416 pages of Sir Humphry Davy’s notebooks and lecture notes, most of which are held in the Royal Institution in London. In this talk, Professor Sharon Ruston will discuss the highs and lows of a crowdsourcing project and reflect upon some of the findings that have come from it. The notebooks offer a huge variety of subject matter, from Davy’s early nitrous oxide trials to his isolation of potassium and sodium, agricultural chemistry, galvanism, and enormous amounts of poetry. They also feature his shopping lists, to-do lists, reading lists, diary entries and travel writing as well as gossip about his scientific contemporaries. You can see the results here: https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/collections/davy.

Biography: Professor Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism at the English Literature and Creative Writing department at Lancaster University. She has published The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein (2021), Creating Romanticism (2013), Romanticism: An Introduction (2010), and Shelley and Vitality (2005). She co-edited The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy for Oxford University Press (2020) and led the AHRC-funded project to transcribe all of the Davy’s notebooks. With Greg Tate and Frank James, she is co-editing The Poetry of Humphry Davy for UCL Press.

Speakers: Professor Sharon Ruston

Hosts: Dr Samantha Halliday and Prof. Shaun Pattinson

This event is taking place at CG60 in the Chemistry Building, Durham University.