The inaugural Shelley Dinner at University College, Oxford

Organic Chemistry and Biodynamic Agriculture, Electricity and Metaphysics, slavery and the Politics of food, Shelley’s passionate search for deep systemic connections across a wide range of fields establishes him as an inspiration for contemporary interdisciplinary thinkers. And while he’s best known today for his poetry, it could be said that his poetic process was part of a larger mission to challenge society to rethink its rigid frameworks. (In this respect, we could perhaps think of Shelley as an early cognitive scientist). As he noted in his essay “A Defence of Poetry”, one of the key roles of poetry is to “lift the veil of familiarity” and to force us to question our perceptions of the world. With this in mind, I was delighted to dedicate our inaugural Shelley Dinner to the theme of “Rethinking and Reframing”, with an evening that paired serious literary scholarship and poetry readings with creative writing games and playful “perceptual psychology” experiments.

We were privileged to hear from Professor Nicholas Halmi, the main speaker for the evening, who shared key insights into Shelley’s vision of “Mutability” and his subsequent writings, work that transcended contemporary pigeonholes of “Art” or “Science”, and strove to encourage people to rethink their frameworks. I spoke, in turn, about recent experimental data on neuro-cognitive flexibility and the importance of disrupting fixed pattern-matching and presented diners with a light-hearted poetry puzzle based on a Shelley sonnet. (In a nod to the joys of interdisciplinarity, it’s interesting to note that the Shelley Society team was just pipped to the post by a visiting mathematician who said that she leveraged the “beautiful inherent symmetry” of the sonnet to solve the puzzle).

The dinner was graced with contributions from several sections of our College community, across the staff and common rooms: Rufus Jones (2022, Ancient History and Classics), President of the Percy Bysshe Shelley Society, shared some favourite Shelley poems, while the catering staff wholeheartedly embraced the call to “lift the veil of familiarity”, surprising us all with enigmatically blue ice-cream that had diners delightedly attempting to guess its flavour. And Univ’s Executive Chef, Darren Lomas, who has worked extensively in the past with cognitive psychologists to create renowned “food illusion” experiments, generously created a highly memorable taste perception experiment involving rare “Miracle Berries” from West Africa. Chewing on a berry radically alters the chemical balance of human taste receptors for several minutes afterwards, and the Hall was filled with laughter and debate as, having chewed the berries, diners bit into lemons and limes, convinced that these tasted of cheesecake or honey. The berries’ effect wears off within 30 minutes, but I’m told that many guests continued to question everything they tasted, long after they left Hall. I like to think that Shelley might have been amused.

Pireeni Sundaralingam (1986, Experimental Psychology) is College Poet Laureate and Interdisciplinary Catalyst

Published: 5 December 2024

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