Scarlett McQuillan, University of Stirling Hafed in Glasgow: Oriental Occulture in late-Victorian Scotland By Scarlett McQuillan, University of Stirling Glasgow 1869. August heat has thickened the air and brings slum stench northwards through the streets. A growing hub of opposites, the sandstone seams of lavish villas and squalid tenements threaten to […]
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Samuel Glauber-Zimra, Ben Gurion University of the Negev For several months in 1932, John Myers was the most famous spirit photographer in England. A member of the London Jewish community, although not particularly observant himself, Myers’s rapid rise and fall drew in several other prominent British Jews, both living and […]
Dr Emma Merkling, University of Stirling and The Courtauld Institute of Art ‘Don’t look into his eyes,’ I’m warned. ‘They can hypnotise you.’ I try heeding this advice when I finally find myself in front of the painting in question. Azur the Helper, June 15, 1898 hangs on the far […]
Dr Elizabeth Dearnley, University of London In her memoir about her role in creating the Cottingley Fairies photographs, published posthumously in 2009, Frances Griffiths recalled her first impressions of a wintry West Yorkshire. Arriving from South Africa in the spring of 1917 to find blacked-out streets and snow still on […]
Emily Vincent, University of Birmingham ‘…the rooms of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research were thrown open for public inspection’.[1] — Harry Price, Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter (1936) Lab coats, test tubes, and an array of musical instruments are not the typical objects one expects to find when confronting the history […]
Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira (林友樂), University College of London & Wellcome Trust Known in Chinese as ‘Spiritual Science’ (xinling kexue 心靈科學), psychical research was introduced into China from Japan in the 1900s and soon took the country by storm. Inspired by such prominent associations as the Society for Psychical Research […]
Dr Brian McCuskey, Utah State University In July 1883, the landscape photographer William Harding Warner announced ‘a new scientific subject’ in the British Journal of Photography. Warner had been experimenting with stereoscopic photography since the 1850s, but he was now working in a different dimension, trying to capture images of […]
Dr Efram Sera-Shriar, Science Museum Group In 1882 the artist and spiritualist Georgiana Houghton published a photobook called Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye. Its aim was simple: to provide a compelling set of photographic evidence that affirmed the veracity of the […]
Dr Efram Sera-Shriar, Science Museum Group When friends and colleagues speak with me about my research on modern spiritualism, I am often asked if I can show them a cool example of a spiritualist artefact, and to their immense disappointment, I usually hand them a piece of chalk. While at […]
Professor Christine Ferguson, University of Stirling Welcome to ‘The Media of Mediumship’, an AHRC-funded project produced by the University of Stirling and the Science Museum Group, in collaboration with Senate House Library. Look closely at the picture below. What do you see? An old camera, once state-of-the-art, now obsolete. Heavy […]