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NEWS AND EVENTS IN THE HUMANITIES

In September 2009, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Yale ornithologist Richard Prum one of their generous 5-year Fellowships. An evolutionary ornithologist who has studied the development and evolution of feathers, including those of dinosaurs, Prum knows how he'll spend the windfall. Prum's new research, which he cheerfully admits is "pretty out there," explores incarnations of the arts within evolutionary processes. "In particular, I'm interested in aesthetics, the connection between sexual selection as it occurs in birds, and bird plumage, and bird song and the arts, generally, or what we understand as the arts. I'm talking about the commonalities between the process of the evolution of ornament in nature and the sort of aesthetic process we see in human arts and whether those processes are a lot more similar than we realize." (loe.org/shows/shows.cfm?programID=09-P13-00040#feature7).

Concomitantly, some university-affiliated programs explore intersections of ecology and arts practices. Among them is Oregon State University's Spring Creek Project (springcreek.oregonstate.edu/), whose "Long-Term Ecological Reflections" supports creative writers-in-residence at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon's central Cascade Range (andrewsforest.oregonstate.edu/). Much of the scientific work at H.J. Andrews Forest is concentrated on analysis of forest and stream ecosystem dynamics, as part of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Long Term Ecological Research program. Spring Creek's Long-Term Reflections Program, itself intended to continue for two hundred years, focuses on extending human understanding of this forest's changes over time through writers' projects drawing on and correlating literary and scientific knowledge.

No strangers to long-term perspectives on science, the History of Science Society (HSS), founded in 1924, and today with about 3000 members worldwide, fosters interest and scholarly research in the history of science and its social and cultural relations. The society's 2009 annual meeting takes place 19-22 November in Phoenix, Arizona. The meeting program is available at www.hssonline.org/. HSS also posts links to announcements and calls for papers for dozens of science- and science-history conferences held all over the world, at www.hssonline.org/profession/meetings/index.lasso.

Kate Christen (christenc@si.edu)
Humanities Representative, Board of Governors

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