Kathy Cashman is a geology professor who specializes in volcanoes. William Rossi is a literature professor who specializes in Thoreau and literary history. This unlikely pair will co-teach a class next year entitled "Reading, Writing and Rocks" that will examine scientific writing, particularly in the earth sciences.
The course is the latest example of the UO's efforts to bring humanities and science together in creative ways.
Rossi and Cashman will look at the ways in which scientific writing uses literary devices such as metaphor and rhetoric. The writing of Charles Darwin, for instance, provides rich examples.
In his famous tome, On the Origin of Species, Darwin uses rhetorical methods of persuasion to propose his theory of natural selection. He starts with an analogy the readers of his time would have been familiar with: artificial selection, which refers to man-made efforts to breed desired traits into plants and animals, such as herding behavior in dogs or size in tomatoes.
Darwin also uses metaphor to conjure an entity he calls "Nature," which he personifies as a being that has the good of each species in mind. Portrayed almost as a classical deity, Nature selects the desirable traits. Plants and animals equipped with these traits are able to survive to then pass those traits on to their offspring, while those less equipped don't live long enough to do so.
Students in the class will have the opportunity to apply a similar analysis to geologic writings, starting with Charles Lyell (1830s), whose work had a major impact on Darwin, through scientists writing about the plate tectonic revolution (1960s).
Rossi and Cashman, who have co-taught two previous courses together, will use a Lorry Lokey grant during the spring 2009 term to prepare for this class. One of their goals will be to develop a list of practicing scientists and historians of science who examine issues of language, and to study their works. They also plan to invite some of these scholars to campus during the 2009-10 school year to present to the university community.
Lokey, the founder of Business Wire, has donated nearly $132 million to the UO in recent years, including $74.5 million for faculty, graduate student and program support in the sciences and other programs.
Cashman and Rossi received a Lokey "Science and the Human Condition" grant, which supports interdisciplinary projects between the natural sciences and the social sciences and humanities.
- Amanda Miles
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