The Magus Astronomer

About the Speaker

Malabika Sarkar is Vice Chancellor and Professor of English, Ashoka University. Her field of academic interest is Early Modern Literature and the History of Science. Primarily a Miltonist, her publications include Cosmos and Character in Paradise Lost (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Her other area of interest is Romantic Literature and she is on the International Advisory Board of one of the leading journals European Romantic Review. Her book in this area is Moneta’s Veil: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (2009). Her most recently publication is a chapter on the poetry of Yeats and Kipling in a multi-author book published by Routledge in July 2019.

Before coming to Ashoka she was First Vice-Chancellor of Presidency University in Kolkata (2011-2014), responsible for moulding the iconic Presidency College into a University. Earlier she was Professor and Head of Department of English at Jadavpur University, member of the University Council at a critical point in its history and member of many academic committees of the university. An alumna of Cambridge University, she was later Visiting Fellow and now elected Life Member of Clare Hall College, Cambridge. She is an invited Fellow of the English Association (FEA), UK. She was a member of the University Grants Panel of Experts in English and Foreign Languages, a panel member of NAAC and panelist and speaker at many Higher Education conventions across India. Deeply interested in women's welfare and the education of underprivileged children, she is currently the President of the Women's Coordinating Council (WCC), founded in 1960, the apex body in the State of West Bengal with 74 affiliated NGOs.

Abstract

The two defining moments in the history of science that had a direct impact on the minds and imagination of all of humanity were the announcements of Copernicus’s heliocentricity and Darwin’s evolution. The first released a hitherto central stationary earth into a giddying orbit in space and the second challenged mankind’s status as the last and best of God’s creation. Copernicus’s revolutionary findings and the kaleidoscopic events that followed provide the context in which I take a brief look at the life and work of an English astronomer and an English sonneteer of the early modern period. Thomas Harriot and Fulke Greville were contemporaries and the reticence and reputation of the first and the intellectual curiosity with severe self-admonishment of the other provide a window into the world of science and society in early modern England. If the prevailing atmosphere was one of excitement, it was accompanied by a deeply troubling self-censorship.