Poe and Spiritualism
During Spiritualism’s Victorian Era heyday, millions of devotees crowded around séance tables to contact their dearly departed loved ones. While Spiritualism’s levitating tables and trance mediums are familiar to most, much less known is poet Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on the movement. Join Chris Semtner, the Poe Museum’s curator and the author of Haunting Poe, as he reveals Poe’s associations with Spiritualism’s early practitioners and how his stories inspired and popularized their beliefs.
Speaker Bio
The curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Chris Semtner is an award-winning, internationally exhibited visual artist whose work can be found in numerous private and public collections. The Webster Award-winning author has written several articles and chapters in addition to eight books about Poe, visual art, horror, pop culture, and cryptography. Semtner has written for Biography.com, Crime Writers’ Chronicle, Resources for American Literary Study, and other publications. He has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura, SyFy Wire, and Rue Morgue Magazine, in addition to appearing in documentaries in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Venezuela, and Japan. He regularly speaks about strange and macabre subjects at various venues from the Steampunk World’s Fair and GalaxyCon to the U.S. Library of Congress and as far away as Paris, Madrid, and Kyoto.
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 can’t make the talk live on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
