Guy Ortolano previews speech ahead of "Two Cultures" event

As I previously blogged, the New York Academy of Sciences is hosting an event on May 9th called "The Two Cultures in the 21st Century."  I asked one of the speakers, Guy Ortolano, who teaches the history of science at the University of Virginia, to give Selling Tomorrows readers a preview of his speech -- and he graciously agreed.  Guy says:

"I plan to ask about the way that we engage with Snow's "two cultures" thesis, if we actually pay attention to the things that he said. Snow is often to be assumed to have been lamenting a division between scientists and other intellectuals, and to have been calling for renewed communication between them. But how does our presumed relationship with Snow and his thesis change, if we take seriously his claims that Modernist writers were partly to blame for Auschwitz, or that literary intellectuals monopolized political power in the Western world, or that the United States and Britain needed to send English teachers throughout Asia and Africa? 

My intention is not at all to discredit Snow, who was engaged in a number of serious arguments in his own time and place, but I do want to challenge the presumption that we are somehow participating in the same conversation now that he was engaged in then. At the end I hope to suggest different ways that we might think about the relationship between Snow, The Two Cultures, and our own historical moment."

Guy is the author of "The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Post-War Britain."  Here's the press release announcing the book, which just came out in February.