Archives: Digital Events

Amidst the Demons

Fallen angels, devils, demons – the greatest trick Satan ever pulled was convincing us that he and his compatriots didn’t exist. Well, regardless of whether or not demons are “real” or not, from Asmodeus to Ziminiar they’ve had an effect on human imagination (and nightmares). In this presentation Ed Simon talks about the influence that “demonological poetics” has had on culture and the ways in which the Devil has often been a measure of all that we can know (or don’t know).

Speaker Bio:

Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, the editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books, and a staff writer for Literary Hub. A widely published writer, he is the author of over a dozen books, including Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain.

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

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

Rags, Bones, and Other Sacred Objects

Every culture, every religion, every era has enshrined otherwise regular objects with a significance which stretches beyond their literal importance. Whether the bone of a Catholic martyr, the tooth of a Buddhist lama, or the cloak of a Sufi saint, relics are material conduits to the immaterial world. Yet relics aren’t just a feature of religion. The exact same sense of the transcendent animates objects of political, historical, and cultural significance.

Speaker Bio:

Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, the editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books, and a staff writer for Literary Hub. A widely published writer, he is the author of over a dozen books, including Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain.

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

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

Curating the True Crime Corpse: Murderabillia, Fandom and Identity

From public lynchings to gallows audiences, history has shown us that humans love to watch the body break down on a public stage. Not uncommon to take souvenirs, cuttings and items from the scene of death, it was believed that the blood of the hanged man, skull of the murderer or dirt from the gallows floor, held a potent magic to cure ills and protect the holder. In a contemporary sphere, we continue these practices by consuming the true crime corpse from the civilised comfort of our homes.

Placed within the frames of victim, or killer, and streamed through various platforms, the remediated true crime corpse has become a sought-after item; the booming industry of murderabillia has grown in conjunction with our need.

This talk will discuss the corpse as a remediated commodity, and the dark fandom who seek out engagement and possession of it. With detailed examples of murderabilia, items that can be considered of corpse, by association or proximity, this talk will discuss how the true crime corpse becomes to key to identity building for those who collect and curate it.

Speaker Bio:

Tia Price is a PhD candidate at the University of Portsmouth. Her research examines the corpse in popular culture, specifically in dark fandom. She has presented her work at various conferences including ‘Death in Visual Culture III’ 2020, BAFTSS 2023 and the ‘Inked Up & Marked Out’ symposium 2023. Tia has been published in The Routledge Handbook of Death, Heritage & Museums (2023), The Journal of Popular Communication (2025) and #TrueCrime:Digital Culture, Ethics and True Crime Audiences (2025). She works as a Study Skills Tutor in Higher Education and gives regular talks at The College of Psychic Studies.

Curated & Hosted 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

What Does it All Mean: Carl Jung and finding meaning in a living world

Modernity tells us to ignore the signs and symbols that appear to us in the world, in psychedelic trips, psychotic visions, and even in our dreams. But when we do, and when we know how to interpret them, we find invaluable guidance for how to live our fullest lives. Join Rob Faure Walker at the Last Tuesday Society as he takes us on a guided journey into the animate world that we all inhabit. We’ll embark on a guided meditation to explore the symbols emergent in our minds. But please also be on the lookout for symbols that appear to you and bring them along for the group to explore and find meaning in.

Speaker Bio:

Rob is an ecotherapist and author who lives between the great neolithic monument of Avebury and Stonehenge. When not writing, he can be found bothering the remaining stones and structures of this great ceremonial landscape or helping his clients to find meaning in the few remnants of ancient forest across the area. His last book explored how to find loving transcendence while being forced to live in a transactional market economy. His forthcoming book, Radical Jung, is out in late May and explores healing through Gnostic introspection so that we can act better in the world.

Find out more about Rob’s ecotherapy here – https://www.integratedmindscapes.co.uk/

Curated & Hosted 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

Riders at the Door: The Nordic Legends of the Wild Ride

This lecture will introduce the main types of Nordic folk legend associated with the Wild Ride, noting the differences between the more southerly types (mainly Swedish and Danish) telling of a single Óðinic rider hunting a supernatural woman, and those more north-westerly legends in which the ride, made up of a mixture of troll-like beings and the dead, is commonly led by a female figure who seems to be associated with the mid winter period. As the article will note, these differences seem to have a background in pre-Christian beliefs that once again underline a difference between western Norway and then Sweden and Denmark. If there is space, the article will note how the western Norwegian beliefs are closely connected to, and reinforced by, ancient active beliefs about groups of supernatural riders who would take over farms at Yuletide, killing or stealing anyone who go in their way. These beliefs in turn seem to have been closely connected to the widespread Nordic traditions of groups of disguised young men who went round farms in the same dark period demanding food and drink. The legend gave character to the tradition, and the tradition gave credence to the legend.

Speaker Bio:

Terry Gunnell is Professor emeritus in Folkloristics at the University of Iceland. Author of The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia (1995), he is editor of Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Area (2007), Legends and Landscape (2008), and Grimm Ripples: The Legacy of the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagenin Northern Europe (2022), and co-editor of The Nordic Apocalypse: Approaches to Völuspá and Nordic Days of Judgement (2013); Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið 1858–1874which was nominated for the Icelandic Literature Award in 2017; and The Old Norse God Freyr

New Perspectives in Mythology and Religion. He has also written numerous articles and chapters on Old Nordic religions, folk legends and belief, festivals, folk drama and performance, and is behind the creation of the Icelandic folk legend database Sagnagrunnur, and two other digital databases on the creation of national identity and the early collection of folklore in Iceland in the late nineteenth century.

Curated & Hosted 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

WTFpots: putting the anal into artisanal clay workshop

Join me, Sarah Sharp from WTFpots live on zoom to find out how I make people feel uncomfortable with clay. You’ll learn how to sculpt and paint sculptures to creep people out by using different textures, orifices and many, many flappy bits. Join us for a fun and creative evening full of laughter and interesting conversations.

Speaker Bio:

Sarah from WTFpots is known for crafting everything from stomas to custom dick pics and creating props for the BBC. Expect the absurd and a whole lot of clay anatomy.

Curated & Hosted 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

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.

Curated & Hosted 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

Mummies, Magic, and the Macabre: Inside the Victorian Egyptian Obsession

The Victorians had a lot of kooky quirks, but their obsession with ancient Egypt might be the weirdest one.

From mummy unwrapping parties and stolen limbs to tales of shape-shifting beetles, the nineteenth century’s blend of colonial guilt and lust for conquest produced something truly wild.

In this online talk, Dr Jay Sullivan, author of Egyptian Gothic, will take you through the history of modern Egyptomania, from the mummy as medicine through to Tutmania. Meet the people who took human heads as souvenirs, discover what really went on at a mummy unwrapping party, and uncover the truth behind the mummy’s curse. Along the way, we’ll answer some of the strangest questions of the era: What was in mummy brown paint? Who had a secret stash of mummy penises? And did a mummy really sink the Titanic?

Speaker Bio

Dr Jay Sullivan is a writer and researcher based in South London. She holds a PhD from the University of Roehampton and an MA in Victorian Studies from Birkbeck College. Her research blends museum, sensory, and gothic studies with a focus on the Victorian Egyptianised Gothic genre. Egyptian Gothic 1884-1920, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2025, is her first book.

Curated & Hosted 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

The Way of the Weird: Britain’s Empire and Its Afterlives

This lecture explores how horror was a useful tool for Tré in studying how racism impacts him in relation to streets and buildings. In other words, it forced him to coexist with the colonial ghosts that remain trapped in Britain’s physical geographies, from buildings to statues. Focusing on his experiences – like at galleries, museums, and country houses – this lecture considers how the racist energy found in colonial places left there by the dead like former enslavers, impacts the spirit bound to empire’s shadow.

Tré come from cultures where being connected with the dead (as ancestors) is normal. Yet, colonial spaces attack his sense of self.

Ghosts reflect what a society says is memorable and so often, the UK frames white ghost stories around middle-class anxiety and property, but not what that privilege enables. Focusing on histories of empire as histories of the present, this lecture thinks about racism upon the spirit via the ghosts in popular places like: enslavers and enslaved people on rural estates; Black wo/men disembodied by UK immigration policy; and the residue of slave-based wealth in today’s pubs and British rail? Ghosts.

Speaker Bio:

Tré Ventour-Griffiths is a disabled freelance historian-sociologist, creative writer and Black history consultant with interests in place history, real and imagined hauntings, pop culture, and violence: from the overt to the institutional. He just submitted his PhD: a creative writing project that combines UK Black regional history with nonfiction to tell a Black Caribbean folk history of Northants. Beyond his PhD, Tré examines the ways Black Britain is haunted by afterlives of the British Empire, including the slave-based wealth etched into many heritage sites romanticised in period dramas, like Jane Austen screen adaptations. Much of his other work looks into the history, questions of identity, and social commentaries, in UK-US film and television. He has written and presented on texts like Marvel, Star Trek, horror, and period dramas, from Call the Midwife to Bridgerton. As a travelling scholar-creative, Tré writes on Substack as The Avid Pedestrian.

Website: https://treventour.com

Writing + More: https://linktr.ee/treventoured

Curated & Hosted 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

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