While Victorians almost without exception engaged science, the somewhat muted voice has been that of Dickens. Even the curious reader of Victorian literature would struggle to find within his immense literary corpus any commentary on science. However, careful perusal of Dickens’s novels and correspondence, including the numerous essays appearing in Household Words and All the Year Round, will disclose a more than casual engagement with science. One finds, instead, a sustained conversation taking place among any number of seminal nineteenth-century scientific concerns, among them astronomy, the heat principle, steam technology, light, electricity, magnetism, electro-magnetism, expeditions, heredity, chemistry, the biological and classificatory sciences, optics, the microscope, the telescope, chemistry, gravitation, light, gardens (including sea gardens), speed, trauma, dreams, railway signals and other technologies including braking, machinery, the telegraph, photography, waste, the ether, circulation, and polarization. This special session explores specific and oblique ways the novels of Dickens engage the emerging science, especially interdisciplinarities and the novels’ engagements with sustainability in light of the current ecological crises, energetics, and emerging technologies like the railway, trauma, and the technologies of safety. In “Dickens and the Technologies of Trauma,” Jude V. Nixon examines Dickens obsession with the railway and its influence on travel, speed, and time. Essays such as Henry Morley’s “Need Railway Travellers Be Smashed?” and its sequel “Self-Acting Railway Signals” drew attention to railway safety by championing the device of the amateur inventor C. F. Whitworth, which, if approved and deployed, would reduce railway accidents, many from faulty braking systems. Because of the economic juggernaut the industry had become, the regulation of railways by the government on behalf of the public had become a constant challenge. Railway traveling had become potentially very dangerous, and the equipment and mode of operation was such that serious accidents could be expected anywhere at any time. Dickens himself narrowly escaped death in a railway derailment at Staplehurst. Dickens avoided all references to the incident in Our Mutual Friend perhaps because he was still traumatized by the accident. As he writes, “No words can describe the scene,” and “No imagination can conceive the ruin of the carriages.” The presentation concludes by looking at the related trauma in Dickens’s Christmas ghost story, “The Signalman” (1866), written, it would appear, as a way for Dickens to come to terms with the trauma inflicted on him from the Staplehurst accident. The story also challenges the rational claims of science and the progress of technology. The essay concludes by examining the trauma in Tale of Two Cities surrounding the technology of the guillotine that drove the French Revolution. Barri J Gold, in “Reading Ecology in Dickens, or, Musings on the Possible Contributions of Literary Studies to the Present Ecological Crisis,” argues that the genre of the novel is undoubtedly implicated in the structures of anthropocentric culture and the western rationality that constructs self through opposition—to women, animals, the uncivilized, the body and the natural world. On the other hand, science, still dominated by presumptions of a radical separation of subject and object, has done its share to promote a highly problematic erasure of the other's subjectivity. If, however, as philosopher Val Plumwood argues in Environmental Culture, “what requires philosophical engagement in the context of anthropocentric culture is self rather than other, the limits imposed by the human rather than the nature side of the ethical relationship,” we need not—should not—cede consideration of the natural world to the sciences, who may need us as much as we need them. From this perspective, the novel affords us opportunity in proportion to its complicity. It gives us a chance to change ourselves as readers of both text and ecology. Gold proposes to explore how we may begin to do so, beginning with Dickens’s Great Expectations. She plans to begin by re-examining our self without effacing the world, how we might foster an imagination that is less anthropocentric and less appropriative. It is precisely because the bildungsroman seems so emphatically to center the human subject that it presents a challenge to our imagining alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Dickens’s subtexts of environmental toxicity, the inescapable complicity of humanity in creating such toxic environments, and Dickens’s peculiar sensitivity to how we “detoxify” our own discourse, obscuring our complicity and naturalizing the changed environment, make Great Expectations a great place to begin to retrain. Finally, Renata Kobetts Miller, in “The Interdisciplinary Vision of Bleak House,” uses Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-53) to explore how the Victorians imagined interdisciplinarity in the face of an increasingly disciplined world. The importance of Victorian culture for what later came to be known through C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis as “the two cultures” is evident in a cluster of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century novels. In A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), Allegra Goodman’s Intuition (2006), Lorrie Moore’s The Gate at the Stairs (2009), and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011). The contemporary specialized and professionalized academic landscape is central to the novel’s structure or action, and all of these novels are dense with references to Victorian literature and culture, as well. This paper focuses on Intuition to argue that it sheds light on its source text Bleak House in the context of the emergence of disciplines in the nineteenth century. Goodman’s “lab-lit” novel explores how sciences and humanities provide different ways of structuring experience, and it engages in extensive intertextual relationships with Victorian novels, including Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Intuition provides a lens that helps us to understand the noteworthy formal feature of Bleak House: its two narrators. Beginning famously with the image of a megalosaurus in the streets of Victorian London, Bleak House foregrounds the increasingly influential discipline of science. Its two distinct narrators—a third-person omniscient narrator and the first-person view of Esther Summerson—dramatize the emerging and distinct worldviews of scientific empiricism and humanism. Both Bleak House and Intuition suggest the need for a form of interdisciplinarity, as each represents disciplinary perspectives as partial and incomplete.