This themed issue of Public Humanities contests the hackneyed yet persistent divide between the literary humanities and the sciences. Public issues that are ostensibly scientific are necessarily embedded in and inflected by language and culture. For this reason, research at the interface of literature and science offers a crucial tool for fresh interventions into seemingly intractable scientific, technological, medical, and environmental debates, as well as their social ramifications. Literature and science research has the capacity to speak to readers and policymakers who are alert to the implications of scientific findings and to those who are educated in and attuned to the humanities, and to bring these two audiences together. Approaching scientific subjects from the vantage of the humanities generates a distinctive expertise that can inform public policy on science as well as the public understanding of science.
In April 2024, we held the first joint conference of the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS), the Commission on Science and Literature (CoSciLit), and the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSAeu) at the University of Birmingham (UK).Footnote 1 Commissioned off the back of this conference, this issue of Public Humanities aims to open dialogues and explore intersections between literature and science as they bear jointly on the public sphere. In the process, we make a robust case for the relevance of literary expertise to public issues well beyond the acknowledged realm of the arts, from healthcare to forestry to AI.
Ultimately, what is at stake in cultural and political engagements with science is citizenship itself: the intersection of understanding and action that both justifies and motivates democracy. We find ourselves at a precarious moment when the empirical evidence of science is routinely undermined even as our societies become ever more dependent on technologies that embody the unprecedented complexity of scientific knowledge. Civil society cannot function in the absence of reliable information nor of human connection. In the 1990s, the role of literary criticism may have been to critique the hubris of some of science’s practitioners. While that need has not gone away, as the disproportionate influence of a tiny number of tech entrepreneurs on public discourse shows, there is also now an urgent need to critique the critique, or rather to expose the fallacies and distortions on which the ongoing dismissal of science relies. Arguments based in scientific knowledge alone seem all too often to struggle to shift public debate, hamstrung as they are by science’s long-honed, studied language of objectivity and cautious evaluation. Literature, in contrast, moves people emotionally as well as intellectually, bringing home the urgency of seemingly abstract or remote concerns. The interventions we have collected in this issue testify to students’ learning about the environment motivating their future care for it, to technologies that can offer support for people’s best lives, and indeed to our capacity to maintain a liveable planet for all.
The public issues to which science is central can be illuminated by literature on the one hand and critical analysis on the other. For this themed issue, we have compiled five roundtables in particular centred on three principal domains: health and the human body; environmental care and environmental change; and AI and technological innovation. Each of these themes was in the foreground in our discussions at the conference, and each is a perennial but particularly pressing concern within the public sphere. It was important to us to solicit interventions from around the world, inside and outside the academy, and across the academic ranks, including contributions from scientists and creative artists. The articles themselves likewise range from research that bears on public debate through educational innovations to reports of and reflections on public engagement practice.
Sally Shuttleworth’s roundtable on Animating Victorian Science at the conference provided the model for structuring this issue through roundtables. As the principal investigator on two large interdisciplinary projects, “Diseases of Modern Life” and “Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries,” Shuttleworth has extensive experience of working with scientists, artists, and animators to explore and communicate the resonances of Victorian science and technology within public debate today.Footnote 2 We were keen to invite her to explain the conceptualization of this roundtable and its wider relevance and were delighted that she accepted. From there, we decided to solicit introductions to our other four roundtables from a range of experts with their own distinctive angles of vantage. Brian Hurwitz, who introduces the roundtable on Health Humanities, was the founding director of the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London.Footnote 3 With over twenty years prior experience practicing and teaching in primary healthcare, he has both a panoramic view over the medical humanities and acute insight into their practical efficacy. He was also one of the keynote speakers at the conference of the three societies on literature and science in Birmingham. Another of our conference keynotes, Rob MacKenzie, was the founding director of the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR).Footnote 4 An atmospheric chemist, he has advocated tirelessly for the humanities as having unique and invaluable contributions to make to our understanding of forests and our relationships to them. Indeed, this roundtable is in many ways a tribute to that advocacy, as two of the contributors, Thomas Kaye and Dion Dobrzynski, both conducted their PhD research as literature scholars within BIFoR, while a third, Toria Johnson, has been an active member of the institute under MacKenzie’s leadership.
Shuttleworth, Hurwitz, and MacKenzie offer us perspectives as senior experts in their respective fields, trained in the latter two cases in the sciences yet fully apprised of the value of the humanities. For our other two introductions, we have invited scholars working at the cutting edge of ecocriticism and artificial intelligence (AI) ethics to reflect on the significance of these two roundtables. Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square is Assistant Professor in Literature, the Environment, and Climate Change at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. An expert on Romantic literature who works on ecology on the one hand and neurology on the other, she is adept at making precisely the kinds of connections between literature, science, and the public sphere that we are aiming to showcase through this themed issue. A former senior researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, Kanta Dihal is currently Associate Professor in Science Communication at Imperial College, London.Footnote 5 Her work on AI has frequently taken her into the public realm, advising international organizations from the United Nations to the G20, repeatedly gauging the consequentiality of new technologies and interrogating the assumptions that underlie their development and adoption.
1. Roundtable 1: Health humanities
In his introduction to our first roundtable, Brian Hurwitz argues that the intersection between medical science and the humanities opens new ways of thinking about and discussing personalized medicine.Footnote 6 At this intersection, medical approaches grounded in the quantitative methods of the biosciences intersect with humanities-based perspectives that emphasize interpretation and contextualization. Together these approaches shift the focus from the treatment of disease alone towards a more integrated conception of sustainable health, one that situates individuals within their broader social, environmental, and interspecies contexts.
The four papers of the round table show different aspects of these encounters and give relevant impulses for pertinent discussions in the public sphere. Drawing on ideas from science and technology studies, posthumanism, and environmental humanities, Nathaniel Otjen argues in “Pandemic Persons: Being Human in a Time of COVID” that COVID-19 challenged societal beliefs in human separateness, individuality, and control.Footnote 7 The virus demonstrated that humans are biologically and socially entangled with other species and environments. Otjen claims that being a “pandemic person” in the twenty-first century means living with a contradiction: people increasingly recognize their dependence on non-human life but continue to act and organize societies as though humans are separate from the natural world. The essay concludes that this denial of multispecies interconnectedness creates major obstacles to building societies within sustainable environments for the future.
In “Contemporary Poetry as a Dissection Tool for the Study of Anatomy in Medical Education,” Jasmine Hui Jun Tan introduces the concept of “poetic dissection” and demonstrates how literary education within the medical humanities can transform the framework of observation.Footnote 8 In this approach, not only the object of sight—the anatomical body—matters but also the subject of sight: the medical student, who may develop a more holistic understanding of the dissected body, recognizing that serious illness disrupts “biography” as well as “biology.” The article emphasizes that cadaveric dissection has historically occupied a central role in medical education, yet is increasingly being replaced by three-dimensional (3D) imaging and digital simulations. While these technologies enhance anatomical learning, they may also create distance, reducing illness to an anonymous collection of symptoms. Poetry and the medical humanities help bridge this gap by integrating the study of biological structures with the practice of caring for individual patients. In doing so, they encourage empathy, careful observation, and reflective thinking in medical education.
In her paper “Cognitive Augmentation in Speculative Writing,” Martina Zimmermann takes a critical stance towards speculative accounts of future nanotechnological and neuro-pharmaceutical applications in medicine, whether predictive popular science that blurs the line between factual science and future make-belief, such as Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind, or creative science fiction that integrates rather than challenges beliefs in future technological possibilities, like Jeffrey Moore’s The Memory Artist. Footnote 9 Zimmermann argues that these works shape public opinion as well as “social belief systems” by promoting optimistic, technology-driven transhumanist scenarios, thereby diverting attention from the social, medical, structural, political, and institutional responsibilities associated with an increasingly aging society.
From a different perspective, in “Emerging Knowledge in Times of Crisis: The Microbiome and the Porousness of Science and Literature in Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (2018)” Davina Höll examines the reframing of the human–microbe relationship, tracing its development from Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s (1632–1723) discovery of microorganisms, through Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg’s (1795–1876) more holistic reconceptualization of microbial life, to the emergence of contemporary microbiome research associated with Joshua Lederberg and others over the last two decades.Footnote 10 Reading Adam Dickinson’s poetry collection Anatomic (2018), Höll demonstrates how science and literature illuminate the interdependence between humans and non-human life. The paper argues that contemporary crises and the conditions of the Anthropocene expose human vulnerability and multispecies entanglements with particular clarity, even as some institutions and societal structures shaped by economic interests continue to reinforce notions of human/non-human separation and independence.
2. Roundtable 2: Climate change
The second roundtable brings together four papers examining how literature can be used to address climate change to practical effect. In her introduction, Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square offers neuroplasticity as a figure for the potential of stories to reshape society, especially societal responses to our changing climate.Footnote 11 Considering the movement of cause and effect leading from story to brain to human behaviour, Jones Square takes encouragement from the similarity of the work of changing a narrative to that of changing the climate, observing that we will have to have new ways of narrating in order to bring into being new ways of responding to climate change as individuals and as societies.
In “Engaging with Climate Change through Tales,” Kevin Piper reflects on his experience teaching climate literature, revealing both his students’ positive responses to fictional models for adapting to our present reality and some of the practical effects of calling into question common presumptions about what a good life in a changed climate might entail.Footnote 12 He focused a unit of his fall 2024 literature and science course on Tales of Two Planets, an anthology of climate literature with an international scope; the students’ expectations of a series of pessimistic takes were confounded by the possibility of “narrative agency” rather than passive subjection to climate change. Offering narrative agency specifically as a remedy for learned helplessness in the face of the scope of the problem, Piper concludes that such agency can provide not only models for climate action but also encouragement as to the potential effectiveness of such actions.
In “Narrative Matters: Vulnerable Bodies and Australian Climate Fiction,” Andrea Righi, Jo Winning, and Mridula Nath Chakraborty explore the power of narrative outreach in motivating engagement where it has historically produced measurable and positive effects.Footnote 13 Working in line with Judith Butler’s analysis of vulnerability, they show that it not only marks the effects of power upon a subject but also–indeed especially–provokes agency for resistance to power. Reading Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius, a novel of speculative fiction deriving its perspective from the First Nations’ experiences of European colonization of Australia, and Ellen van Neerven’s novella “Water,” which likewise considers indigeneity and colonization in an Australian speculative fictional context, Righi, Winning, and Chakraborty trace these texts’ textual invitations to empathy and action in the face of climate change.
In her reflective essay “Deeptime Difficulties: Human Stories in a More-Than-Human World,” Lucy Grace, a creative practitioner, considers a range of texts as experiments that move beyond bearing witness to climate change and into beginning the work that Amitav Ghosh has called for, bringing science and speculation into fiction.Footnote 14 Grace situates her reading in a “More-than-Human World,” developing it from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s juxtaposition of the “three histories” of Earth, what lives here, and industrialization. In this context, she traces the limits of linear narrative and blurs the lines between humans and the non-human timescales at play in the Anthropocene. Seeing climate fiction as a step in the right direction, Grace calls for more, and “more playful,” experimentation.
In “Engaging Science through Science Fiction,” Jade Arbo takes as her focus a 20-student course, “Regenerative Ecologies: Imagining Sustainable Futures through Science Fiction,” held at the University of Pelotas [Brazil], with a mixed group of university students and local community members.Footnote 15 Detailing the participants’ shared development of visions for the ecological future, Arbo amplifies the connections between interdisciplinary reading practices and the diverse perspectives of students in university extension programmes. Arbo makes clear the potential of science fiction to support citizen engagement not only with envisioning good futures but especially with the active transformation of the present towards such futures.
3. Roundtable 3: Forest ecology and engagement
The third roundtable hosts a dialogue between literary scholars and natural scientists on the more specific environmental concern of how best to manage and preserve forests, and in particular how to mobilize public support for such projects. Rob MacKenzie sees, in his introduction to the round table, common “modes of thought” between science and humanities, drawing out the benefits of these intersections for public engagement with environmental ethics and sustainability.Footnote 16
Thomas Kaye’s article “On Literature and the Experimental Forest Laboratory” explores the intersections of creative writing and forest ecology through the example of the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon.Footnote 17 Bringing together artists, scientists, and writers, this project fostered collaborative approaches that contributed to the development of the concept of “New Forestry.” These ideas seek to challenge the traditional divide between economic interests and ecological concerns that has long shaped forest management practices. Kaye also discusses Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory, which engages with the project in a fictionalized form. Both the artistic interventions and the scientific innovations advocate for a new forest ethic that shifts public attention away from the economic exploitation of forests toward ecology, sustainability, and interdependence.
In “Making Trees: From Macbeth to the Modern Day,” Toria Johnson starts from Shakespeare’s Birnam Wood scene in Macbeth as a literary “lieu de mémoire” (Pierre Nora) and demonstrates how a symbolic site can be contextualized within an educational framework that engages not only with local history but also with broader forms of global engagement surrounding environmental justice.Footnote 18 This objective is reinforced through a wide intertextual network that connects Shakespeare’s Birnam Wood with Włodzimierz Odojewski’s short story The Wood Comes to Dunsinane Hill, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, and Eleanor Catton’s New Zealand novel Birnam Wood.
In their coauthored paper “Mycorrhiza and Metaphor in Twenty-First-Century Science/Fiction” literary scholar Dion Dobryzynski and mycologist Nathan Smith examine the diverse ways in which metaphors and analogies of “mycorrhiza” have shaped both literary and scientific imagination, as well as practices of science communication, through processes of intertextual exchange.Footnote 19 The authors critically reflect on the uses and potential misuses of metaphorical and analogical thinking from both scientific and literary perspectives. At the same time, they argue that this interdisciplinary engagement with the epistemic powers and limitations of metaphors can deepen public understanding of complex scientific concepts while also enriching literary archives and interpretive frameworks.
Continuing the interdisciplinary dialogue with the humanities, MacKenzie observes from a scientific perspective that the literary contributions discussed in the issue illuminate important blind spots, such as the persistent underappreciation of flora and vegetal diversity within school science curricula. He also addresses the social and ethical responsibility to support plant migration and translocation processes necessitated by the accelerating effects of climate change. Drawing on the reflections of Kaye, Dobryzynski, and Smith, MacKenzie further argues that the conscious and informed use of epistemic metaphors and analogies—despite often being undervalued within scientific discourse—can open new creative avenues for academic thought while also fostering greater public awareness of and policy engagement in forestry and environmental issues.
4. Roundtable 4: Artificial intelligence
The fourth roundtable tackles the growing presence and influence of AI from several different angles, with each article reaching its own distinctive conclusions on how and how far to accommodate AI within our lives as citizens, artists, and educators. Kanta Dihal frames these engagements in her introduction through the historical connection between speculative literature’s imaginings of various artificial intelligences and the technologies that today cluster under the “AI” label, noting that along with this long-lived literary context there is an ongoing counterinfluence of present technology on future narratives.Footnote 20 For Dihal, a crucial question is “who is AI for?”—a question all three of the authors in this roundtable engage.
Jay Labinger’s article “The Understory or Galatea 22.2? Thwarted Expectations in Richard Powers’ Playground” takes up the work of Richard Powers with a very different focus to that seen in our Forest Ecology and Engagement roundtable.Footnote 21 Labinger considers the narrative threads of Powers’ 2024 novel Playground in relation to the immediacy of our need to reckon with the combined impacts of humanity and AI at work on this planet. Through a careful focus on the voices of Playground, Labinger juxtaposes “what AI will do to” and “for” us, landing on the question of whether we can—or should—counter humanity’s impacts on our environment by embracing AI’s impacts on us.
In “Radical and Regressive: Artificial Intelligence According to Jeanette Winterson—A Reading of 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next (2021), The Stone Gods (2007), and Frankissstein (2019)” Laura-Jane Devanny takes a feminist tack in considering AI in several of Jeanette Winterson’s works.Footnote 22 Through as-yet-futuristic developments described in these texts, Devanny surfaces present-day concerns with the forms and functions of new technology and its replications and extensions of human prejudices and presumptions about gender. Asking not only what present culture will impose on new AI but also how various AI technologies will affect human ways of being, she offers speculative fiction as a crucial genre for conceiving a range of possible relations between human and AI.
Sowon Park, in “Creative Writing and AI: A 2024 Case Study,” closely reads the 2024 Mellichamp Mind and Machine Initiative at University of California, Santa Barbara, in which a literary competition was explicitly opened to submissions written with AI.Footnote 23 Park reflects on her experience judging this student competition, with attention to the qualities of the stories that were made with or without AI and especially to the submitters’ reports on their processes. Park draws conclusions not only about what AI tools are currently capable of but also about how human writing might be positively affected by the existence of AI-generated text.
5. Roundtable 5: Animating Victorian science
As Sally Shuttleworth explains in her introduction, our final roundtable was submitted for the conference in Birmingham as a panel presentation to showcase how contemporary artists have been working with and drawing inspiration from Victorian computational, communicative and creative innovations.Footnote 24 The Victorian fascination with novelty and spectacle, shared by our own cultures today, offers a bountiful opportunity to draw on artistic forms to enhance research itself while widening public participation.
In “Victorian Science in Two and a Half Dimensions: Using 3D Software to Explore 19C Images,” Sydney Padua draws from her experience as a professional animator and discusses two of her artistic projects that re-enliven scientific knowledge and imagery of the nineteenth century for the public audience of the twenty-first century.Footnote 25 In her first project, she presents how she reconstructed Charles Babbage’s and Ada Lovelace’s “Analytical Engine” from textual notations with contemporary 3D animation techniques. While Babbage had left many single sketches and diagrams, there are no historical records of a full visualization of the project. Padua’s work started as a web comic, was finally published as a graphic novel, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (2015), and shows how this unrealized design for a projected computer was supposed to operate. The second part of the article discusses her contributions to the “Constructing Scientific Communities” Project as an artist in residence. Padua here reflects the functions of artistic animation for the playful or subversive engagement with neglected historical material of scientific illustrations from natural history magazines. Padua argues that animation can serve both educational and artistic purposes. It can clarify complex scientific ideas, as in the case of the “Analytical Engine,” while also creating delight and emotional connection, as with the animated animal engravings. By combining historical materials with modern digital tools, animation can bridge the gap between contemporary audiences and scientific heritage, making archival content more understandable, memorable, and appealing.
Eric Dyer’s performances recorded in his article “Artful Evolutions of Victorian Era Optical Devices” present individual vantage points on contemporary urban realities transformed through the artistic mediation of historical Victorian optical devices such as the zoetrope and the phenakistiscope.Footnote 26 While these devices were originally employed during the Victorian era to enhance public engagement with science, their contemporary artistic reinterpretation repositions them as tools for critical reflection. The technical mechanisms once designed to generate optical illusions and animated motion are thus transformed into artistic devices that produce alienation effects and forms of defamiliarization, challenging the “effet de réel” commonly associated with 3D projections and virtual reality environments.
In her artistic project “Victorian Speed of Life,” Karen Louise Monid adopts an opposing approach.Footnote 27 Here, the history, science, and technologies of industrialization are reconstructed through historical documents, including personal letters reflecting individual mental and emotional states, as well as Victorian advertisements and newspaper articles. The resulting scripts, animations, and projections transpose Victorian experiences of mental, bodily, and environmental overwhelm caused by rapid industrialization into contemporary contexts. In doing so, the project invites contemporary audiences to compare, historicize, and contextualize their own experiences in relation to those of the nineteenth century. At the same time, it reinterprets nineteenth-century public staging technologies, such as the magic lantern, through the lens of twenty-first-century digital media, transforming contemporary public spaces into forms of digital theatre.
6. Breaking Down the Barriers: Literature and Science in Public Discourse
Time and again across these roundtables, we see the imagined barrier between scientific knowledge and technologies on the one side and literature and the arts on the other fade away before our eyes. Poetry informs our perceptions of anatomy and stories our appreciation of forests, while reading non-fiction and fiction alongside one another reveals the fictive imagination in play in both. Tackling global challenges such as climate change, pandemic diseases, aging populations, and the sudden ubiquity of AI requires the insights of creative writers and acute readers from around the world just as much as the exposition of scientific data or technological innovation. It is not only contemporary literature and art that have a bearing on these questions either. Recreating Victorian technologies or revisiting Renaissance plays revivifies the past while advancing our understanding of our own concerns in the present.
We have orchestrated this themed issue through discrete roundtables, but the boundaries between these too are equally porous. The contradictions between human preoccupations and the realities of a more-than-human world come into focus in the microbial processes within and around us but also in the geology that at once fuels and bears witness to climate change. The creative work of indigenous writers from Australia and the Americas proves crucial in thinking beyond both the paralysing discourses that prevent action on climate change and the damaging assumptions and practices of conventional forestry. Richard Powers’s novels raise profound questions about the interrelationships between humans, the natural world, and technology, whether your starting point is forests, fungi, the oceans, or AI. Debates on the interactions and tensions between invention and imagination, new technologies and techniques of art, that feel so fresh and urgent are anticipated by the Victorians’ equally ambitious and disconcerting modernity. Innovative artistic methods of science communication can help to alert us to the Victorian origins of our own medical concerns, too, bringing this series of roundtables full circle.
Together these papers and this themed issue as a whole affirm that literature and science scholarship is vital to public debates on medicine, environmental sciences and technology. Literature and the arts have never been a mere diversion. They are fundamental to human experience and thinking, in science as much as in any other field. The role of literary scholarship within the public humanities is to draw out and develop the reflections on experience and the intellectual work done by literature itself to ensure that students and scientists, politicians and the public, understand better what prospects lie before us and what is truly at stake.
Author contribution
Formal analysis: J.H.; Writing - review & editing: J.H., A.H.; Methodology: J.H.; Writing - original draft: J.H.; Conceptualization: A.H.
Open access
