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In ancient Greece, probably from the Archaic period and certainly from the Classical period onwards, Homer was seen as the preeminent poet. More than that he was a symbol of nationhood, a historian who told the Greeks about their origins and ancestors, and also a witness to the actions and character of the gods. Given… Continue reading The Iliad as a ‘dangerous’ text. Part 1 →

I dismissed using Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as a metaphor for contemporary science a bit quickly in my 2018 paper ‘Homer in the laboratory’, only focussing on the idea of οικος as a metaphor for how contemporary science labs operate. On reflection I think a more sustained reading of formal science, its practitioners and institutions,… Continue reading The Iliad and Odyssey as sources of metaphors for understanding formal science? →

My ‘Homer in the laboratory’ paper that was published in January 2018 was earlier rejected from another journal; this is fairly common in social science and humanities academic publishing and authors just have to get used to receiving criticism. Sometimes reviewers’ comments are helpful, other times spiteful or dismissive. Occasionally they are factually inaccurate. One… Continue reading How many days does Homer’s Iliad cover? →

I carried out the field work for ‘Homer in the Laboratory’ in 2015, spending 12 weeks in total in an applied microbiology laboratory. Lab work has always fascinated me and my book, Science, Culture and Society: Understanding Science in the 21st Century (Polity 2016), has extensive descriptions and analysis of laboratory work (not the same… Continue reading A paper from my ‘Homer in the Laboratory’ project is published →

We have a curious relationship to science, and this makes understanding science, specifically understanding its role in society and its relationship to culture, difficult. By ‘we’ I mean all of us and, in particular, three groups I would like to focus on here.   The general public, the ‘lay public’ as we / they are… Continue reading A starting point for an experiment →

I love science, its workings, its practitioners, its methods and results. I have spent much of the last 20 or so years researching science from a broadly sociological / cultural studies perspective and have thoroughly enjoyed doing that. I’ve published a few books and papers based on my research (most recently Erickson 2015), and I… Continue reading Homer in the laboratory: an introduction →