Abstract: In this talk, Professor Sharon Ruston will explore notebooks kept by Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), the foremost British chemist of the early nineteenth century and a President of the Royal Society. These notebooks shed light on Davy’s creative processes as he isolated elements for the first time, invented the miners’ safety lamp that came to be known as the ‘Davy lamp’, attempted to unroll the Herculaneum papryri, and wrote his famous Royal Institution lectures. The notebooks also reveal that Davy wrote poetry throughout his life, sometimes while in his laboratory at work on his chemical experiments.
Bio-sketch: Professor Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism and current Head of 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 currently led an AHRC-funded project to transcribe all of the Davy’s notebooks.
Bio-sketch: Professor Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism and current Head of 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 currently led an AHRC-funded project to transcribe all of the Davy’s notebooks.
