Last week (4th-5th June, 2015), a group of international scholars met at the Manchester Museum in Manchester, UK for a symposium titled, “Stories About Science: Exploring Science Communication and Entertainment Media.” Organised by the team behind the Science and Entertainment Laboratory (David A. Kirby, William R. Macauley, and Amy C. Chambers), the two-day event aimed to open up discussions surrounding… Read more →
Playing God: Film Series Round-up
The Science and Entertainment Lab’s inaugural film series ‘Playing God: Science and Religion on Screen’ ran from March to May 2015. We screened six films with introductions by a Bishop, a theologian, film scholars, a filmmaker, and historians of science. Our wonderful venue, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation (IABF), was busy at every screening. The post-screening discussions were vibrant and… Read more →
The Nineteenth Century CSI Effect: Exploring the Roots of Forensic Fictions in Detective Stories
One of the more notorious recent celebrity murder trials involved actor Robert Blake, who had starred in the Our Gang/Little Rascals films as a child and who played the cockatoo-owning television detective Tony Baretta in the 1970s. In 2002 Blake was arrested on the charge of murdering his second wife Bonnie Lee Bakley. During the subsequent trial there was a… Read more →
‘You’re Blind, But You See So Much’: Netflix’s Daredevil and Blindness
This post contains very *minor spoilers* for the Netflix series Daredevil up to episode 6 ‘World on Fire’. Netflix recently released its most recent original series, an adaptation of Marvel’s Daredevil. It joins Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and Agent Carter’s focus upon the more human characters of the Marvel Universe. Agent Phil Coulson, Agent Peggy Carter, and Daredevil/Matt Murdock are… Read more →
Creativity and Collaboration across the Arts/Science Divide
I recently presented a talk at a University of Manchester event trying to bridge the (supposed) gap between the arts and sciences. The talk was given in the Pecha Kucha format which requires the presenter to use 20 slides and to spend exactly 20 seconds on each slide. I thought it would be interesting to post this presentation on our… Read more →