Digital Event Type: Zoom Lecture

Occult Revivals: Cults and New Religious Movements in Horror Cinema – Miranda Corcoran – Zoom

Occult Revivals: Cults and New Religious Movements in Horror Cinema
 
Sinister cults and secretive sects have long been a source of fascination, particularly within the genres of horror and the gothic. In the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of social upheaval and dissatisfaction with traditional religious institutions resulted in the proliferation of new religious movements (NRMS) that simultaneously ignited the burgeoning youth culture and sparked a moral panic in more conservative quarters. On screen, new religions and cults were frequently a source of voyeuristic fascination, with 1970s horror films like The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, Race with the Devil, and Devil’s Rain portraying cults, rather sensationally, as loci of moral and sexual transgression. Later representations of new religions, particularly as rendered in 2000s and 2010s films like Midsommar and The Other Lamb, are often more ambivalent, treating cults as sites of violence and horror but also, potentially, of liberation and pleasurable transgression. This talk will track the development of cinematic cults from the 1960s through to the present day, exploring how onscreen cults reflect contemporary anxieties about religion, youth rebellion and sexuality.
 
BIO: Miranda Corcoran is a lecturer in twenty-first-century literature at University College Cork. She is the author of Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches, published in 2022 by the University of Wales Press. She currently the Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies and a co-editor of the journal Shirley Jackson Studies. Her new edited collection Satanism and Feminism in Popular Culture: Not Today Satan was released in November 2025.
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.
Image: Getty Images, Creative Commons
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Necromancy: Death, Ritual and the Imagination – Lena Heide Brennand – Zoom

Necromancy: Death, Ritual and the Imagination

From ancient tombs to Victorian séance parlours, humankind has long sought to speak with the dead — and to listen when they whisper back. In this illuminating and unsettling lecture, cultural historian Lena Heide-Brennand delves into the shadowed history of necromancy: the rituals, taboos, and imaginative worlds that blur the boundary between the living and the departed.

Tracing the practice from the Greek Magical Papyri to Norse seiðr, from Renaissance conjurers to Romantic poets, this talk explores how societies have used death not only as a mystery to be feared but as a language to be read. What does it mean to summon a voice from the grave? How do art, faith, and folklore preserve the presence of the dead — and what ethical questions linger in that act of calling?

A journey through centuries of memento mori and midnight invocation, this lecture invites you to stand at the threshold where scholarship meets the supernatural, and imagination keeps the dead forever speaking.

Bio:

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

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

 

Medieval Necromancy and the Cursed Imagination – Sophie Page – Zoom

Medieval Necromancy and the Cursed Imagination

Necromancers – medieval Christian demon conjurors – thought they could compel demons to reveal the truth about anything they asked, including all the secrets of the past, present, and future. Demons had access to extraordinary knowledge because of their immortality and superior rationality. It was not that they were omniscient: rather that they had lived for a very long time, had seen it all before, and were superlative predicters. Some medieval thinkers thought of demons as the first natural scientists, permitted by God to pass the eons observing and interpreting humans to puzzle out each sin an individual was likely to succumb to. As the demons wandered eternally in the sublunar realm, they noticed things of great interest to the necromancer: where treasure was buried, who stole objects of value, unfaithful lovers, wrongful imprisonment, and princes’ guilty secrets. In this talk I will discuss how necromancers hoped to succeed in their rituals despite the intense malice and cunning of demons. We will also investigate the mystery and ambiguity of the spirit realm and the charge laid at necromancers that they had a ‘cursed imagination.’

Bio:

Sophie Page is Professor of Medieval History at University College London. She has published on monks and magic, cosmology, diagrams, animals and rituals and was joint editor of the Routledge History of Medieval Magic (2019). In 2018 she co-created the exhibition, Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Image: The Pilgrim meeting the messenger of Necromancy, from ‘The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man’ by John Lydgate. Cotton Tiberius A VII/1, f. 42.r

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Divining the Past, Present, and Future: Oracles, Series 1 – Four Lectures

Join us for Series 1 as we journey into the histories and mysteries of divination. Delivered by leading scholars in the field, ‘Divining the Past, Present, and Future’ includes talks on specific types of divination, from Mambila spider divination to Medieval necromancy.

Curated & Hosted by

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Image: John Collier, ‘Priestess of Delphi’ (1891), Art Gallery of South Australia

Getting Down to the Bare Bones: Scapulimancy and Second Sight in Scottish Gaelic Tradition – Andrew Wiseman- Zoom

Getting Down to the Bare Bones: Scapulimancy and Second Sight in Scottish Gaelic Tradition 

Scapulimancy (Slinneineachd in Scottish Gaelic) is a form of augury or divination involving the examination or interpretation of the scapula usually, though not exclusively, of the shoulder-blade or speal bone of a sheep, and sometimes that of a cow or a pig. Such a practice was believed to be able to foretell important events in the owner’s life, including deaths, battles, commotions, and other significant occurrences. Disasters such as the Massacre of Glencoe (1692) and the Battle of Culloden (1746) were said to have been prognosticated using scapulimancy.

The earliest ethnographic records of scapulimancy, from a Scottish context, dates to the seventeenth-century and the latest to the nineteenth-century. To judge from these accounts, as well as those supplemented from oral sources, such a practice crosses ethnic and cultural boundaries. Indeed, such a divinatory method is found throughout many parts of the world and is well documented, for instance, in East Asian cultures.

The purpose of this presentation is to critically examine the various early modern sources and to assess why and by whom such a practice was resorted to and why at times scapulimancy is sometimes taken to be or sometimes confused with second sight. Also offered in the presentation are some thoughts on the actual origins of such a divinatory practice either to foretell future events (precognition) or those at a distance in space and time (detection).

Bio:

Andrew Wiseman is a cultural historian, specialising in the Scottish Highlands from the late medieval to the modern period, who has developed a keen interest in Scottish Gaelic intangible culture. He is currently editing a number of works and has authored around twenty chapters and articles as well as numerous blogs and mainstream publications. As editor of the forthcoming titles Your Work Will Remain: Diaries of Calum I. Maclean (1951–1954), From Lochaber, Badenoch, Morar, Arisaig, Moidart, Easter Ross and Sutherland and The Highlands and Selected Writings of Calum I. Maclean, a detailed and engaging account of Calum Maclean’s fieldwork diaries as well as his academic and mainstream publications will offer an opportunity to reassess the legacy of one of Scotland’s most important twentieth-century ethnologists and folklorists.

Image: James Hamilton, ‘Massacre of Glencoe,’ 1883–86. Glasgow Museums.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Divining the Past, Present, and Future: Oracles, Series 1 – Four Lectures

Join us for Series 1 as we journey into the histories and mysteries of divination. Delivered by leading scholars in the field, ‘Divining the Past, Present, and Future’ includes talks on specific types of divination, from Mambila spider divination to Medieval necromancy.

Curated & Hosted by

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Image: John Collier, ‘Priestess of Delphi’ (1891), Art Gallery of South Australia

Creativity in an Eggshell: The Freedom of Uncovering One’s Own World? – Katherine Swancutt

Creativity in an Eggshell: The Freedom of Uncovering One’s Own World? 

Probably every kind of divination requires creativity, but the Nuosu of Southwest China open up whole microcosms of it when cracking eggs into bowls of water and reading the bubbles that form. Nuosu egg divination is a spontaneous craft––one that both shapes and responds to the world––which means that diviners are free to interpret the same results differently. Many clients value this ‘natural’ approach to divination because it lets them address problems flexibly. Yet Nuosu egg divination also raises large questions about the nature of divination that I address in this talk: Is it possible to have too much creativity in divination? Or too much freedom in envisioning our own place within the cosmos?

Bio:

Katherine Swancutt is Project Lead of the ERC synergy grant ‘Cosmological Visionaries: Shamans, Scientists, and Climate Change at the Ethnic Borderlands of China and Russia’ at the Department of Ecological Anthropology, Czech Academy of Sciences. She has worked with Nuosu in Southwest China since 2007 and carried out fieldwork on shamanism and animism across Inner Asia for more than 25 years.

Recent publications include Demons and Gods on Display: The Anthropology of Display and Worldmaking (special issue of Asian Ethnology, 2023) and ‘Dreams, Visions, and Worldmaking: Envisioning Anthropology Through Dreamscapes’ (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2024). Her chapters on ‘Nuosu Egg Divination’ and ‘Buryat Mongolian Card Divination’ appear in David Zeitlyn and Michelle Aroney’s Divination, Oracles & Omens (2024) published by Bodleian Library Press: https://bodleianshop.co.uk/products/divination-oracles-omens (in Europe and UK), or in USA: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo249121065.html

Image: Pointing at a bubble trapped just beneath the surface to indicate the client’s lost soul. Photograph © Katherine Swancutt

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Divining the Past, Present, and Future: Oracles, Series 1 – Four Lectures

Join us for Series 1 as we journey into the histories and mysteries of divination. Delivered by leading scholars in the field, ‘Divining the Past, Present, and Future’ includes talks on specific types of divination, from Mambila spider divination to Medieval necromancy.

Curated & Hosted by

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Image: John Collier, ‘Priestess of Delphi’ (1891), Art Gallery of South Australia

“Come away, O human child!”—a Zoom talk on Changeling Folklore with Simon Young

For the past three years, Dr Simon Young has been part of an international team investigating changeling legends: the widespread belief that supernatural beings (fairies, trolls, witches) substitute humans with magical look-alikes. With the team’s findings now published (The Exeter Companion to Changeling Lore, 2025) and hundreds of records at his disposal, Simon will explore the what, when, and how of changeling folklore.

This remarkable tradition spans far beyond western Ireland, reaching Armenia, the Egyptian Delta, and even tribal Papua New Guinea. It stretches not only through the medieval and modern periods but back into antiquity itself. The team has grappled with fascinating questions: Are child changelings more common than adult ones? How do legends of human mothers exchanging children relate to changeling lore? And perhaps most intriguingly: why did this belief system take hold across perhaps a quarter of the globe?

 

About the Speaker

Dr Simon Young is a British folklore historian based in Italy. He is the editor of Exeter New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Legends and teaches history at University of Virginia’s Siena Campus (CET). He has written extensively on the 19th-century supernatural. His book The Boggart (from Exeter University Press) and The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends (from Mississippi University Press) came out in 2022, with other recent books on The Wollaton Gnomes (2023) The Deerness Mermaid (2025) and the opening volume of his Fairy Census (2023). Simon also co-presents the supernatural podcast Boggart and Banshee with Chris Woodyard.

Articles listing: https://independent.academia.edu/SimonYoung43
Substack: https://britishmythology.substack.com/

 

Your curator and host for this event will be the author Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is All the Fear of the Fair (Oct 2025) part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, for which he also edited Eerie East Anglia (2024). For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

[Image: from The Changeling, attributed to Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), from The Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection.]

Divining the Past, Present, and Future: Divination – David Zeitlyn – Zoom

Divination: ‘Looking for answers, not just stars and cards but spiders too!’’  

After many years of studying Mambila spider divination in Cameroon I will discuss different ways of understanding a particular occult practice such as ŋgam dù – versions of which are found throughout southern Cameroon. This allows us to better appreciate the approaches to the academic study of divination exemplified in the recent Oxford exhibition and related book. People are looking for answers to hard questions. There is huge variation in how answers are produced. We should focus on questions not techniques when thinking about divination in general.

Bio:

David Zeitlyn is professor of social anthropology at University of Oxford and conseil technique to the chief of Somié in Cameroun. He is an initiated ŋgam dù Spider diviner. He has been working with Mambila in Cameroon since 1985. Recent publications include An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts (2022) and Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (2020).  With Michelle Pfeffer he curated the exhibition in Oxford, ‘Oracles Omens Answers’ (Dec 2024-April 2025): https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/oracles-omens-and-answers and edited the related book, Divination Oracles Omens published by Bodleian Library Press:
https://bodleianshop.co.uk/products/divination-oracles-omens (in Europe and UK), or in
USA: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo249121065.html

Image: A divinatory result: Asking about Trump and Biden (2019)

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Divining the Past, Present, and Future: Oracles, Series 1 – Four Lectures

Join us for Series 1 as we journey into the histories and mysteries of divination. Delivered by leading scholars in the field, ‘Divining the Past, Present, and Future’ includes talks on specific types of divination, from Mambila spider divination to Medieval necromancy.

Curated & Hosted by

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Image: John Collier, ‘Priestess of Delphi’ (1891), Art Gallery of South Australia

 

Divining the Past, Present, and Future: Oracles Series 1: 4 lectures – Zoom

Divining the Past, Present, and Future: Oracles, Series 1 – Four Lectures

Join us for Series 1 as we journey into the histories and mysteries of divination. Delivered by leading scholars in the field, ‘Divining the Past, Present, and Future’ includes talks on specific types of divination, from Mambila spider divination to Medieval necromancy.

Curated & Hosted by

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Image: John Collier, ‘Priestess of Delphi’ (1891), Art Gallery of South Australia

Lecture  1 – Divination: ‘Looking for answers, not just stars and cards but spiders too!’’  – David Zeitlyn – 11 January 2026

After many years of studying Mambila spider divination in Cameroon I will discuss different ways of understanding a particular occult practice such as ŋgam dù – versions of which are found throughout southern Cameroon. This allows us to better appreciate the approaches to the academic study of divination exemplified in the recent Oxford exhibition and related book. People are looking for answers to hard questions. There is huge variation in how answers are produced. We should focus on questions not techniques when thinking about divination in general.

Bio:

David Zeitlyn is professor of social anthropology at University of Oxford and conseil technique to the chief of Somié in Cameroun. He is an initiated ŋgam dù Spider diviner. He has been working with Mambila in Cameroon since 1985. Recent publications include An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts (2022) and Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (2020).  With Michelle Pfeffer he curated the exhibition in Oxford, ‘Oracles Omens Answers’ (Dec 2024-April 2025): https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/oracles-omens-and-answers and edited the related book, Divination Oracles Omens published by Bodleian Library Press:
https://bodleianshop.co.uk/products/divination-oracles-omens (in Europe and UK), or in
USA: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo249121065.html

Image: A divinatory result: Asking about Trump and Biden (2019)

Lecture  2 – Creativity in an Eggshell: The Freedom of Uncovering One’s Own World? – Katherine Swancutt – 18 January 2026

Probably every kind of divination requires creativity, but the Nuosu of Southwest China open up whole microcosms of it when cracking eggs into bowls of water and reading the bubbles that form. Nuosu egg divination is a spontaneous craft––one that both shapes and responds to the world––which means that diviners are free to interpret the same results differently. Many clients value this ‘natural’ approach to divination because it lets them address problems flexibly. Yet Nuosu egg divination also raises large questions about the nature of divination that I address in this talk: Is it possible to have too much creativity in divination? Or too much freedom in envisioning our own place within the cosmos?

Bio:

Katherine Swancutt is reader in social anthropology at King’s College London and Project Lead of the ERC synergy grant ‘Cosmological Visionaries: Shamans, Scientists, and Climate Change at the Ethnic Borderlands of China and Russia’. She has worked with Nuosu in Southwest China since 2007 and carried out fieldwork on shamanism and animism across Inner Asia for more than 25 years. Recent publications include Demons and Gods on Display: The Anthropology of Display and Worldmaking (special issue of Asian Ethnology, 2023) and ‘Dreams, Visions, and Worldmaking: Envisioning Anthropology Through Dreamscapes’ (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2024). Her chapters on ‘Nuosu Egg Divination’ and ‘Buryat Mongolian Card Divination’ appear in David Zeitlyn and Michelle Aroney’s Divination, Oracles & Omens (2024) published by Bodleian Library Press: https://bodleianshop.co.uk/products/divination-oracles-omens (in Europe and UK), or in USA: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo249121065.html

Image: Pointing at a bubble trapped just beneath the surface to indicate the client’s lost soul. Photograph © Katherine Swancutt

Lecture  3  – Getting Down to the Bare Bones: Scapulimancy and Second Sight in Scottish Gaelic Tradition – Andrew Wiseman – 15 March 2026

Scapulimancy (Slinneineachd in Scottish Gaelic) is a form of augury or divination involving the examination or interpretation of the scapula usually, though not exclusively, of the shoulder-blade or speal bone of a sheep, and sometimes that of a cow or a pig. Such a practice was believed to be able to foretell important events in the owner’s life, including deaths, battles, commotions, and other significant occurrences. Disasters such as the Massacre of Glencoe (1692) and the Battle of Culloden (1746) were said to have been prognosticated using scapulimancy.

The earliest ethnographic records of scapulimancy, from a Scottish context, dates to the seventeenth-century and the latest to the nineteenth-century. To judge from these accounts, as well as those supplemented from oral sources, such a practice crosses ethnic and cultural boundaries. Indeed, such a divinatory method is found throughout many parts of the world and is well documented, for instance, in East Asian cultures.

The purpose of this presentation is to critically examine the various early modern sources and to assess why and by whom such a practice was resorted to and why at times scapulimancy is sometimes taken to be or sometimes confused with second sight. Also offered in the presentation are some thoughts on the actual origins of such a divinatory practice either to foretell future events (precognition) or those at a distance in space and time (detection).

Bio:

Andrew Wiseman is a cultural historian, specialising in the Scottish Highlands from the late medieval to the modern period, who has developed a keen interest in Scottish Gaelic intangible culture. He is currently editing a number of works and has authored around twenty chapters and articles as well as numerous blogs and mainstream publications. As editor of the forthcoming titles Your Work Will Remain: Diaries of Calum I. Maclean (1951–1954), From Lochaber, Badenoch, Morar, Arisaig, Moidart, Easter Ross and Sutherland and The Highlands and Selected Writings of Calum I. Maclean, a detailed and engaging account of Calum Maclean’s fieldwork diaries as well as his academic and mainstream publications will offer an opportunity to reassess the legacy of one of Scotland’s most important twentieth-century ethnologists and folklorists.

Image: James Hamilton, ‘Massacre of Glencoe,’ 1883–86. Glasgow Museums.

Lecture  4 –  Medieval Necromancy and the Cursed Imagination’ – Sophie Page – 26 April 2026

Necromancers – medieval Christian demon conjurors – thought they could compel demons to reveal the truth about anything they asked, including all the secrets of the past, present, and future. Demons had access to extraordinary knowledge because of their immortality and superior rationality. It was not that they were omniscient: rather that they had lived for a very long time, had seen it all before, and were superlative predicters. Some medieval thinkers thought of demons as the first natural scientists, permitted by God to pass the eons observing and interpreting humans to puzzle out each sin an individual was likely to succumb to. As the demons wandered eternally in the sublunar realm, they noticed things of great interest to the necromancer: where treasure was buried, who stole objects of value, unfaithful lovers, wrongful imprisonment, and princes’ guilty secrets. In this talk I will discuss how necromancers hoped to succeed in their rituals despite the intense malice and cunning of demons. We will also investigate the mystery and ambiguity of the spirit realm and the charge laid at necromancers that they had a ‘cursed imagination.’

Bio:

Sophie Page is Professor of Medieval History at University College London. She has published on monks and magic, cosmology, diagrams, animals and rituals and was joint editor of the Routledge History of Medieval Magic (2019). In 2018 she co-created the exhibition, Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Image: The Pilgrim meeting the messenger of Necromancy, from ‘The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man’ by John Lydgate. Cotton Tiberius A VII/1, f. 42.r

Attendees will receive a recording of each lecture valid for 4 weeks.

 

 

Hexentexte – Professor Patricia Allmer – Zoom

Hexentexte

This talk by internationally renowned scholar of Surrealism Professor Patricia Allmer will discuss the significance of witches and witchcraft in post-war surrealist art by Germanophone women artists. Focussing on how and why women artists adopted, transformed, and re-assigned magical and ritual practices into aesthetic styles, forms, and systems, the talk will explore a range of specific works by artists including the Swiss Meret Oppenheim, the Austrians Renate Bertlmann and Birgit Jürgenssen, and the Germans Valeska Gert, Ursula, and Unica Zürn (whose first publication, a collection of drawings and anagram-poems, was titled Hexentexte or Witches’ Writings). In these works, prominent elements of the traditions of arcane knowledge and performance long associated with witchery combine with, and are transformed by, innovative surrealist techniques and strategies of representation to construct new and subversive kinds of art, repurposing myths and tales from the deep folk histories of central Europe to offer a radical commentary on the experiences of modern women.

Speaker’s Bio

Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh. Her many books, exhibitions, and essays have transformed the study of modern and contemporary women artists and surrealism, starting in 2009 with her curation of the award-winning Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism at Manchester Art Gallery, the first major exhibition on this topic. Her contribution to art history and her long-term international scholarly impact on the study of women artists and surrealism have been recognised by awards including a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2010) and an Association for Art History Fellowship (2023). Her books include Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (2016) and The Traumatic Surreal (2022), hailed in its Woman’s Art Journal review as “groundbreaking”, offering “new perspectives on female positions and lineages in the history of surrealism”. Her co-curated 2024-25 Henry Moore Institute exhibition The Traumatic Surreal is inspired by and based on this book. Professor Allmer is also a major international scholar of René Magritte, publishing three books on the artist, and delivering the prestigious 2017-18 International Émile Bernheim Programme lectures in Brussels on his work.

Hosted & Curated by

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

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Two Renegade Sexologists – Mikita Brottman

Renegade Sexologists

This lecture will consider the life and work of two renegade sexologists: Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and J. Paul de River. The aristocratic Krafft-Ebing was a German psychiatrist and author of the seminal Psychopathia Sexualis. J. Paul de River was the chief psychiatrist of the Los Angeles Sex Offense Bureau during the 1940s and author of The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytic Study. The work of these two eccentric, obsessive, and sometimes deluded psychiatrists provide compelling time-capsules into the dark underbelly of 19th century Vienna, and the sordid backstreets of mid-century Los Angeles. Lectures will be illustrated and enhanced by vivid clinical case studies of what the authors deem “sexual psychopaths.”

Speaker Bio

Mikita Brottman, PhD, NCPsyA, is an Oxford-educated scholar, true crime author, psychoanalyst, and professor of literature and psychology at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She performs forensic evaluations for the National Institute for the Study, Prevention, and Treatment of Sexual Trauma. She was formerly the Chair of Engaged Humanities at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, and has taught at various universities in Europe and the USA. She has also worked in the Maryland prison system and forensic psychiatric facilities. She is the author of 16 books. Her latest, Guilty Creatures: Sex, Death and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2025.

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.