Archives: Digital Events

Are you a lizard person?: The strange history of the reptilian conspiracy theory – Joseph P Laycock – Zoom

Are you a lizard person?: The strange history of the reptilian conspiracy theory

According to conspiracy theorists like David Icke, our world has always been ruled by a race of evil, shape-shifting, reptilian humanoids who masquerade as human and assume positions of power. More than a dozen violent crimes, including murders and bombings, have been committed by people trying to stop the reptilians. This talk traces the conspiracy theory from its origins in the stories of Texas writer Robert E. Howard, through occult groups during the Great Depression, and finally to the early internet. It will also apply a religious studies approach to explore why the conspiracy theory is so enduring.

Speaker Bio:

Joseph P. Laycock is a professor of religious studies at Texas State University. His research explores new religious movements, moral panic, and spirit possession, among other topics. His books include The Penguin Book of Cults (2025), The Exorcist Effect: Religion, Horror, and Demonic Belief (2023), and Speak of the Devil: How the Satanic Temple is Changing the Way We Talk About Religion (2020). He is also a co-general editor for the journal Nova Religio is a professor of religious studies at Texas State University. His research explores new religious movements, moral panic, and spirit possession, among other topics. His books include The Penguin Book of Cults (2025), The Exorcist Effect: Religion, Horror, and Demonic Belief (2023), and Speak of the Devil: How the Satanic Temple is Changing the Way We Talk About Religion (2020). He is also a co-general editor for the journal Nova Religio

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.

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Convulsive Beauty: Hysteria and the Surrealist movement – Sarah Jaffray – Zoom

Convulsive Beauty: hysteria and the Surrealist movement

André Breton, the founder of the surrealist movement, declared ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or it will not be at all.’

This talk explores the history behind Breton’s ‘convulsive’ beauty and how it can help us understand Surrealism. We’ll see how the context war and hysteria studies inspired Surrealists to challenge conceptions of ‘normalcy’ and how they helped shape the possibilities of a new world.

Image credit: Paul Richer, from Études cliniques sur l’hystéro-épilepsie ou grande hystérie, 1881 (via Wellcome Collection)

Speaker Bio:

Sarah Jaffray is an art historian, educator, curator and writer based in London.   Currently the head of art history at City Lit, London’s largest adult education college, Sarah has also worked in curatorial positions at the British Museum, the Bridget Riley Art Foundation and Wellcome Collection. Her art historical work is interested in late 19th and early 20th century Europe and the U.S. with emphasis on institutional systems of power.

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

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The wicked women whom the Devil feared – Tommy Kuusela, PhD – Zoom

The wicked women whom the Devil feared

There are also many folk tales about wicked women whom the Devil feared or with whom he worked closely – women who were not thought of as witches, only as wicked during their lifetimes. one example is a woman known as the Pintorpa Lady, who was the wicked lady of Eriksberg Castle. It is said that she ordered a crofter to fell the largest oak tree in the park and transport it to her. The crofter used the lady’s two deceased husbands as draught horses. Later, she is seen dancing with the Devil before accompanying him to hell. Another woman, known as Sko-Ella or Kitta Grå, once made a bet with the Devil that she could break up a married couple – something the Devil had failed to do. If she succeeded, she would receive a pair of fine new shoes. She succeeded, but the Devil did not dare to hand the shoes over to her directly, instead passing them to her using a stick. This very motif can be found in several Swedish medieval church paintings. In this talk, I will examine these stories and use folklore studies to analyze them. They tell us different things: one is humorous but at the same time misogynistic, the other is critical of the aristocracy.

Speaker Bio:

Tommy Kuusela earned his PhD in History of Religions at Stockholm University in 2017. He has published more than 70 articles on Swedish folklore and Old Norse religion. He works at one of Sweden’s oldest and largest folklore archives, founded in 1914 in Uppsala. Kuusela is often on the move, both in Sweden and abroad, giving talks at conferences, museums or for organizations. He is often contacted by different media such as television, radio, newspapers and podcasts. He is the host of Sweden’s biggest folklore podcast with more than 2,2 million downloads.

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

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The future is weird: Jeff Vandermeer, science, ritual, and the strangeness of climate crisis – Dr Juni Kvarving – Zoom

The future is weird: Jeff Vandermeer, science, ritual, and the strangeness of climate crisis

Change is scary.

As we push ourselves past climate tipping points and end what once seemed like immutable normalities, weird fiction has made a notable comeback. Through the frightening weird ecologies of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series (the source material for the film Annihilation, dir. Alex Garland), this talk argues that leaning into both the horror and excitement of strangeness is key to addressing crises.

Guiding you through the strange roots of the weird literary tradition and drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, I argue that we can look to VanderMeer’s Area-X as a necessary confrontation with the limits of our reality. My talk will particularly focus on how his fiction inverts the uncanny and explores the way ritual, science and faith appears when faced with the Real. This weird aesthetic, what I call the eco-weird,models how we can come to terms with the horror of breaking our unsustainable reality so we can pursue a strange but better future—if we dare.

Speaker Bio:

Juni Kvarving is a researcher, writer, and editor. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Kent about the narrative aesthetics of climate emergency and tipping points in contemporary American utopian novels. Alongside her research, she co-directed the New Voices in Postcolonial Studies Network (NVPoco), worked at Wasafiri Magazine for International Contemporary Writing, edited for Holland House Books, and taught as an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Kent and Course Instructor at CIEE London. Juni is currently interested in nostalgic aesthetics and the environment, and is co-editing a forthcoming special issue on “The American Dream/American Nightmare” with the European Journal of American Culture. Website: https://junikvarving.com/

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

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Tales from the Time Between Times – Owen Staton – Zoom

Tales from the Time Between Times

When the veil thins and the night presses close, when the wind moves like a whisper through the trees and the firelight dances with a life of its own… that is when the old stories wake.

Come, draw nearer to the firepit at the heart of the forest, where shadows stretch long and the past is never truly past. Here, storyteller Owen Staton invites you into that liminal hour — the time between times — where myth and memory walk hand in hand.

Hear the hollow laughter of the Mari Lwyd as she rattles her skull at the threshold. Catch a fleeting glimpse of the Tylwyth Teg, fair and terrible, watching from just beyond the circle of light. And listen… closely… for even the Devil himself is said to wander these woods when the darkness is at its deepest.

These are not just stories. They are echoes. Warnings. Invitations.

An evening of Welsh ghost lore, rich with atmosphere, humour, and a creeping sense of something older than the land itself — told as only Owen Staton can tell it.

The fire is waiting.
The night is listening.
All that remains… is for you to step into the dark.

Speaker Bio:

Owen Staton is a Welsh storyteller and performer with over thirty years’ experience bringing the myths and legends of Wales to life for audiences across the world. As host of the acclaimed Time Between Times podcast, he has built a reputation for weaving atmosphere, humour, and a touch of the uncanny into every tale. Now in his fifty-third year, Owen continues to travel the old paths of story… though his hair, by his own admission, remains entirely beyond his control.

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

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The Yule Lads: Tricksters, Terrors, and the Dark Christmas of Iceland – Lena Heide-Brennand – Zoom

The Yule Lads: Tricksters, Terrors, and the Dark Christmas of Iceland

In Iceland, Christmas does not arrive quietly.

It comes creeping down from the mountains—one figure at a time.

The thirteen Yule Lads, now often softened into mischievous gift-bringers, were once something far less comforting: a band of strange, intrusive beings who descended upon farms in the darkest nights of winter. Each with their own unsettling habits—slamming doors, licking spoons, stealing food—they moved through the household not as welcome guests, but as presences to be endured.

Behind them loomed their mother, Grýla, a monstrous figure said to hunt disobedient children and boil them alive. And beyond her, the vast, silent threat of the Yule Cat, who stalked the snowy landscape in search of those without new clothes to wear.

This lecture explores the darker origins of the Yule Lads within Icelandic folklore: their connection to older troll traditions, their role in seasonal discipline and social control, and the gradual transformation of these figures under the influence of modern Christmas traditions. Through folklore, literature, and cultural history, we will trace how fear, humour, and survival intertwine in one of the most unique festive traditions in the world.

Why thirteen? Why do they arrive one by one? And what do their strange behaviours reveal about life in a harsh and isolated landscape?

This is not the story of Christmas cheer.It is the story of what comes down from the mountains when the nights are longest—and the world feels most fragile.

Speaker 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

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Vampires Before Dracula: Disease, Panic, and the Management of the Undead – Lena Heide-Brennand – Zoom

Vampires Before Dracula: Disease, Panic, and the Management of the Undead

Long before Dracula gave the vampire a cloak, a castle, and a seductive gaze, the undead were something far more troubling: a practical problem.

In the villages of Eastern and Central Europe, the dead did not always stay buried. Bodies were said to rise, to feed, to return to their families—not as spirits, but as flesh that would not decay properly. Livestock sickened. Children wasted away. Entire households fell ill. And in response, communities acted—not with superstition, but with a grim, methodical logic.

This talk explores the historical phenomenon of the so-called “vampire panics” of the 17th and 18th centuries, when officials, clergy, and physicians were drawn into investigations of the undead. Corpses were exhumed and examined. Reports were written. Remedies were prescribed. The boundary between folklore, medicine, and early science began to blur in unsettling ways.

Why did certain bodies become vampires? What did people actually see when they opened the grave? And how did disease—particularly those that distort the body in death—shape the belief that the dead were feeding on the living?

From stakes driven through the heart to sickles laid across the throat, from garlic and fire to the careful repositioning of the corpse, this lecture reveals the ritual technologies developed to contain the restless dead. These were not random acts of fear, but structured responses to a world in which death itself seemed unstable.

Drawing on historical case studies, medical misunderstandings, and the anthropology of death, this talk repositions the vampire not as a figure of gothic romance, but as something far older and more disturbing: a body that refuses to behave.

Because before the vampire became seductive, it was unmanageable.

Speaker 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

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Opium Dreams: Desire, Decay, and the Victorian Imagination – Lena Heide Brennand – Zoom

Opium Dreams: Desire, Decay, and the Victorian Imagination

What does it mean for a society to fall in love with oblivion?

From ancient ritual intoxication to the smoky parlours of 19th-century London, opium has long occupied a strange and seductive place in human history—at once medicine, muse, and menace.

This lecture traces the cultural, social, and psychological impact of opium across the ages, culminating in its profound entanglement with Victorian society.

In the 1800s, opium was everywhere: prescribed by doctors, sold freely in chemists, and consumed across all classes—from exhausted factory workers to poets, painters, and aristocrats seeking transcendence. It soothed pain, inspired visions, and quietly tightened its grip on a nation in the throes of industrialisation and empire.

Through the writings of figures such as Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we explore how opium shaped literature and the creative imagination—fueling dreamlike beauty, but also paranoia, fragmentation, and despair. We will step inside the opium dens of London’s East End, examine the moral panic they provoked, and uncover how addiction, colonial trade, and class anxieties became deeply intertwined.

This lecture moves between the intimate and the imperial: from private visions to public crises, from the quiet laudanum bottle in the bedside drawer to the vast machinery of the Opium Wars.

Rich in atmosphere and grounded in cultural history, Opium Dreams invites you into a world of velvet shadows and chemical longing—where pleasure and ruin walk hand in hand, and where the boundaries between medicine, vice, and art begin to dissolve.

Speaker 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

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Radio Sorcery: a resonance-based approach to the study of contemporary paranormal practices – Dr Matteo Polato – Zoom

Radio Sorcery: a resonance-based approach to the study of contemporary paranormal practices

The talk introduces a sound and resonance-based approach to the study of contemporary paranormal experiences, focusing on the relational, affective, and performative processes that have shaped occultural practices in recent decades. Radio technology is central to this exploration, considered both materially and discursively. On one side, it traces the use of radio devices among practitioners from the early 1950s – beginning with Friedrich Jürgenson’s experiments on Electronic Voice Phenomena – to the present, including the so-called ‘Estes method’ popularised by the documentary webseries Hellier (2019). On the other, the talk examines radio as a metaphor often used to interpret unexplained experiences, engaging with ideas such as Stone Tape Theory, T.C. Lethbridge’s residual haunting, and John Keel’s superspectrum. These and other frameworks conceptualise the paranormal experience itself as a process akin to radio transmission, made of the tuning-in, decoding, and amplification of otherworldly agencies.

However, the talk does not merely offer a history of paranormal uses of radio. Instead, it proposes an alternative epistemological framework grounded in sound and resonance, capable of foregrounding aspects often overlooked by ocular-centric models. Thinking through sound and resonance – as fundamentally interactive and embodied media – in fact, enables to challenge the often reductionist academic position to the field, redefining the paranormal not as a fixed object of investigation – to be analysed either as an ontological impossibility or as a subjective product of irrationality – but instead as a process emerging from relationalities in-between the embodied and the representational, the experiential and the fictional, the everyday and the exceptional.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Matteo Polato is a researcher, musician and experimental game developer. He is currently Lecturer in Digital Media and Communication at the School of English, Manchester Metropolitan University. In 2025 he completed a PhD on the roles of sound and resonance-based processes in contemporary occulture and paranormal practices. He co-founded D∀RK – Dark Arts Research Kollective at MMU, a research group which explores the creative, communal and boundary-breaking potential of occulture. In the last 20 years he released albums on multiple labels, presented sound art pieces and performed in Europe, UK, USA and Japan. With the collaborative project Yami Kurae he develops experimental videogames inspired by psychogeography and occultural practices.

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

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Norwegian Trolls and the Hidden World – Lena Heide Brennand – Zoom

Norwegian Trolls and the Hidden World

In the deep forests and under the shadow of Norway’s mountains, something watches.

Long before trolls became lumbering figures of children’s stories, they were understood as dangerous, intelligent, and deeply other—beings who lived just beyond the edge of human settlement, in caves, cliffs, and hollow hills. They stole livestock, lured travellers off their paths, hoarded ancient treasures, and, in some tales, hunted human flesh. To meet a troll was not whimsical. It was a risk.

This lecture explores the older, darker layers of Norwegian troll traditions, where the boundary between nature and the supernatural begins to dissolve. Trolls are not merely creatures of myth, but expressions of a landscape that is vast, unpredictable, and not entirely human. They are tied to mountains and weather, to darkness and stone, to the slow passage of time itself.

Drawing on folklore, art, and historical belief, we will examine how trolls were understood across Norway: as solitary giants, shape-shifters, multi-headed beings, or even deceptive figures capable of blending into human society. Particular attention will be given to the work of Theodor Kittelsen, whose haunting visual interpretations captured the uneasy presence of these beings at the edge of sight.

Why do trolls turn to stone in sunlight? What do their stories reveal about fear, isolation, and the limits of human control over nature? And why do they continue to haunt the cultural imagination of the North?

This is not a lecture about fairy tales.

It is about what lives in the mountain—and what happens when it notices you.

Speaker 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

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