Welcome to Consilience

the online journal exploring the spaces where the sciences and the arts meet.

Each issue of Consilience features poems and artwork about science all linked by a common theme, submitted by creatives of all backgrounds. At Consilience, we use a peer-review system to help make our work accessible to all audiences.

Field Notes

As well as reviewing, editing, and facilitating the artwork and poetry of others, the team of volunteers behind Consilience (80 and counting) are also extremely talented poets and artists in their own rights. Every year we aim to produce an edited collection of our own work, which has also been produced using our peer-reviewed approach to creativity.

A welcome from Consilience Founder Sam Illingworth:

When we started Consilience, it was with a simple idea – that poetry and science are not separate ways of seeing the world, but complementary ones. Since then, we have been privileged to publish work that bridges those worlds, bringing together physicists and poets, ecologists and essayists, artists and analysts – all speaking across disciplines to ask better questions, and maybe even stumble into better answers.

This new space – a second home for Consilience on Substack – lets us do that in a different register. Less formal, more conversational, and open to ideas that do not quite fit within a traditional journal issue. It is a place for side notes, for behind-the-scenes thinking, and for inviting others in. I am grateful to the team for helping build this home, and I hope you find something here that makes you want to linger, comment, or even start a conversation of your own.

Below we list team members who have published on our Substack. Meet the full team here.

Interested in the ideas behind Consilience? In this video, Sam Illingworth, the founder of the journal, talks about how Consilience aims to explore the world around us through the interconnections between the arts and the sciences.