Episode 4 - Narratives and Mental Time-Travel

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric) Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones. About the episode: This fourth episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with Professor Simon John James (@ProfSJJames) of Durham University. A well-established literary critic of the nineteenth-century novel, Simon discusses his long-standing interests in the relationship between literature and science: its historical origins and H. G. Wells’s role, all the way up to what scientists and literary critics can offer each other today. Given Simon’s role in the Durham Commission on Creativity in Education, we also discuss the importance of an interdisciplinary perspective within our schooling systems. Episode resources (in order of appearance): Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015) The 1870 Education Act Simon James, ‘Literature and Science’ (2011) Richard Bower and Simon James, ‘Time travel: a conversation between a physicist and a literature professor’ (2017) Simon James, ‘Science journals: The worlds of H. G. Wells’, Nature 537, 162–164 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1038/537162a Durham Commission on Creativity in Education (2019) Tom McCleish, The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (2019) Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003)