Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science
Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, and a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. Psychical research was not only the province of eminent men of science; countless ordinary Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes.In this talk, Alicia Puglionesi will share stories of these forgotten participants in psychical research and describe the system of knowledge-making they developed in the hope of capturing mysterious dimensions of the human mind. The scientific methods used to study nature in the field and the laboratory ultimately proved inadequate for the borderlands of consciousness, permeated by belief and doubt, dream and delusion.
Alicia Puglionesi is a historian of science and medicine. Her second book, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire (2022), examines four sites of resource extraction that also yielded scientific and spiritual narratives core to US settler-colonialism. Her first book is Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (2020). Other writing, scholarly and journalistic, deals with mediumship, haunting, and memory in the American landscape.
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Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon
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