Applications are invited for this week-long summer school, which provides advanced training in history of the life sciences through lectures, seminars and discussions in a historically rich and naturally beautiful setting. The theme for 2017 is ‘Cycles of Life’. The confirmed faculty are Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney), Peder Anker (New York University), Ariane Droescher (University of Bologna), Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute, London), Mathias Grote (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Shigehisa Kuriyama (Harvard University), Maaike van der Lugt (Université Paris Diderot), Lynn Nyhart (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (MPIWG, Berlin) and Lucy van der Wiel (University of Cambridge).
In the early twenty-first century, organisms are understood as having life cycles, inherited sequences of stages through which they reproduce and adapt to environmental challenges. Strategies to disrupt pest and pathogen life cycles play key roles in agriculture, biomedicine and public health. Organisms are also connected to each other, as well as to the air, soil, rocks and water, by material fluxes forming ‘biogeochemical’ cycles. The continual recycling of such elements and compounds as carbon, nitrogen and water links the life and environmental sciences from biochemistry to geology and ecology. The effects of human activities on these nutrient cycles threaten us with climate change, resource depletion and pollution, some of the biggest challenges in global politics today. Yet if cycles are topical, they are neither all new, nor all the same. Cycles of various kinds are among the oldest ways of framing human existence on earth and in the cosmos, and of thinking about health and disease, animals and plants – and at least calendars and seasons remain fundamental. This summer school seeks to understand the history of ‘cycles of life’ from early times to the present day, to trace connections and to identify patterns of continuity and change.
Funding: Wellcome Trust, National Science Foundation
Deadline for applications: 28 February 2017
More information: <http://ischiasummerschool.org/2017-theme>