SYMPOSIUM LINE-UP
Keynote Address · The Muse is Real: Creativity Imagined as a Reality in the Western Tradition
Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka, Religious Studies Professor at University of North Carolina
Author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, TechnologyIn ancient Greece the Muses were goddesses of inspiration for artists and musicians and have remained powerful metaphors of the creative process in the contemporary world. This presentation goes beyond the metaphoric interpretation and explores instances when these goddesses were perceived as real, exploring even contemporary research into extreme creativity that reveals that the human brain believes it is being used by “external agents” to create culture-changing products and creations.
More Alive than the Living: Statue Making as Willing Spirit into Matter:
A Sculptor’s Superstition and a Timeless Ritual Practice
Eleanor Crook, SculptorIn premodern times, statues were created as vessels a deity or consciousness might like to enter into, to assume an earthly presence. Eleanor Crook, sculptor and medical artist, discusses how this ambition, though lost in the Enlightenment, can be revisited by makers for poetic reasons. She will share her secret motivations and techniques for bringing her own effigies, wax and bronze, towards the lifelike.
Eusapia Palladino: Epistemological Troublemaker
Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century ParisThis illustrated talk will examine the battle between science and the occult that played out on the body of the extraordinary physical medium, Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918). Known throughout Europe and the United States as “the queen of the cabinet,” Palladino’s seances were investigated by Nobel laureates and other leading scientists who reported that musical instruments would play, drinking glasses would shatter, dead rats would appear out of thin air, and objects would levitate and smash to floor, all without being touched. Variously called pathological, fraudulent, hysterical, and a genuine conduit to the spirit world—sometimes all at once—Palladino troubled taxonomies, subverted gender hierarchies and baffled some of the most brilliant scientific minds of her generation.
Collection Show and Tell
Evan Michelson, co-star of TV’s OdditiesDealer and collector Evan Michelson will discuss and deconstruct her 19th-century papier maché snail made by the famed anatomist and model maker Dr. Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux.
Stairways to Heaven & Gates to Hell
Leila Taylor, Author of Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic SoulWindows to keep out witches, blue doors to ward off evil spirits, 999 steps to Heaven in China, or an apartment in Brooklyn blocking the way to hell—this talk will explore how we situate the supernatural in our built environment, where architecture and engineering cross with the occult.
RetrOccult: The Golden Age of Paranormal Filmmaking
Ronni Thomas, FilmmakerFilmmaker and artist Ronni Thomas revisits paranormal, occult, and new age documentaries from what he considers to be the golden age of the medium (1960s-1990s). From the UFOs of Billy Meijer in the 1982 tragically kitsch documentary Contact, to the uncanny footage captured in the rarely seen 1982 film The Psychic Connection, Ronni will present and explain why the themes and footage captured in these film are more relevant today than ever.
A Paradise Inhabited by Devils
Elizabeth Harper, WriterNaples is not solely about the cult of the dead, or blood relics or dream interpretation, or medical magic or murder plots or vengeful saints, etc., but is all of those things interwoven as a portrait of a city that’s been, and continues to be, exoticised, romanticized and derided. The talk will separate truth from fiction, from the Romantics’ reports of a primitive city, to contemporary notions about sacred practices, crime and culture.
Afterlife and Labor: Making a Living from the Dead
Kim Kelly, Author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American LaborThis lecture by labor journalist and author Kim Kelly draws on her reporting around gravediggers' strikes, embalmers' working conditions, and other stories from the world of death work.
Yes, It Is Real: Mediumship as Embodiment and the Quest for Knowing
Tiffany Hopkins, Practicing MediumSince the advent and rise of modern Spiritualism in the late 1800s, mediumship—or the practice of talking to the dead—has been both ever-present and ever-questioned in the US. While interest in proving its validity has waxed and waned across religious, social, artistic, scientific, and reform communities through the years, in 2021 it made up a full 25% of the $2 billion psychic services industry—up from 18% in 2018. We can look at economics and the latest research to answer our questions about how real mediumship is, but should we ask better questions, such as why do we continue to be so fascinated by it?
The Burning of Baron de Palm
Colin Dickey, Author of Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American DemocracyColin Dickey will tell the story of the earliest modern cremation in the United States, which took place in western Pennsylvania in 1876. It is a tale involving abolitionists, Theosophists, sanitation experts, an impoverished Bavarian nobleman, and lots and lots of fire.
Fifteen-Years Worth of Morbid Anatomy Talks
Dr. John Troyer, Centre for Death and Society at the University of BathJohn Troyer has been a member of the Morbid Anatomy community since its inception. This talk will present a compilation of some of his most-beloved Morbid Anatomy lectures about dead bodies of all kinds compressed into twenty-minutes along with jaunty background music.
SPEAKER BIOS
Eleanor Crook is an artist inspired by a fear of mortality and intimations of immortality. She works internationally, exhibiting fine art and specializing in wax modeling and bronze sculpture, rediscovering forgotten art techniques and studying the dark masters from art history. Her aim is to create a troubling beauty, anatomical expressionism.
She is artist in residence at the Gordon Museum of Pathology London. Her sculptures are in a number of public collections including the Science Museum London, the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the Gordon Museum, Kings College London, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, the Vrolik Museum Amsterdam, the Anatomy and Pathology museums of Padua and of Careggi in Florence. She has found her spiritual calling as European Attaché for Morbid Anatomy where she presents talks and courses for our eclectic and congruent community.
Colin Dickey is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places; The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained; and, most recently, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy.
Elizabeth Harper’s photos and essays have appeared in Slate, The LA Review of Books, Lapham’s Roundtable, Hazlitt, Image Journal, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog for Like Life: Color and the Body. Her essay on the Sicilian Cult of the Beheaded was a notable selection for Best American Essays.
Tiffany Hopkins (she/her) began studying mediumship after moving into her great-great grandmother's cottage in Lily Dale, the world's largest community of Spiritualists. This talk stems from her research and experiments into channeling for writing, art and music-making. She is also a technology strategist and uses her rational side to help make mediumship more accessible to everyone. She has a weekly show on Lily Dale Radio, and she'd like you to join her over at Normalize Talking to the Dead.
Asti Hustvedt is an independent scholar with a PhD in French literature. She has written extensively on hysteria and is the author of Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris, which was named Editors’ Choice by The New York Times and Book of the Year by The Independent. She is also the editor of The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy and Perversion in Fin-de-Siècle France. She is currently writing a book about hysteria and the occult, focusing on female mediums and the scientists who investigated them.
Kim Kelly is an independent journalist, author, and labor activist based in Philadelphia. She has been a regular labor columnist for Teen Vogue since 2018, and her writing on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in The Nation, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, The Baffler, Columbia Journalism Review, and Esquire, among many others. Kelly has also worked as a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, The Real News Network, and Means TV. Her first book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of America Labor, came out on One Signal/Simon & Schuster in 2022. She was born in the heart of the South Jersey Pine Barrens and currently lives in Philadelphia with a hard-workin’ man, a couple of taxidermied bears, and way too many books.
Evan Michelson is a dealer, collector and restorer of rare, esoteric antique objects with a focus on the history of science, the history of medicine, and natural history. She was co-star of the popular reality TV show Oddities which ran for five seasons on Discovery Science, and has lectured widely on subjects as diverse as wonder cabinets, holy relics, and the history of all things Gothic. Evan was co-owner of the iconic East Village shop Obscura Antiques and Oddities, and she has co-curated several exhibitions dedicated to the material culture of death, mourning, and remembrance.
Evan is currently the owner of Obscura West located at the People’s Store in Lambertville, NJ, where she carries on the tradition of curating objects of often-overlooked yet compelling significance and beauty.
Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her research examines miraculous events within Catholic history to new religious movements. Recent books include American Cosmic: Religion, UFOs, and Technology (Oxford University Press 2019) and The Resurrected: Spiritual Initiations in the 21st Century (forthcoming with St. Martins’ Essentials). She is widely published, recently in Tank, Vox, Vice, and is a featured speaker at conferences, on podcasts, radio, and television. Memorable engagements include the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, a keynote speech at Rice University, and regular presentations at Esalen’s Center for Theory and Research. She is lead investigator on an ongoing study of Catholic manuscripts about saints, levitation, and bilocation, in partnership with The Vatican Secret Archive. In 2009 she was principal investigator for a multi-year program funded by the Department of Education (Teaching American History) to create innovative curriculum in the state of North Carolina to engage students and teachers in learning about the history of the United States.
Leila Taylor is a writer and designer focused on horror and the Gothic in contemporary culture. Author of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, her work has appeared in The Journal of Horror Studies, The New Urban Gothic, The Repeater Book of the Occult, Bitter Root, and liquid blackness. She lives in Brooklyn where she is Creative Director of Brooklyn Public Library.
Ronni Thomas is a filmmaker whose credits include the AMC docuseries The Broken and the Bad featuring Giancarlo Esposito, Walter Potter: The Man Who Married Kittens, The Midnight Archive film series and the 2021 feature occult documentary The Kybalion. His work can be seen at themidnightarchive.com.
Dr. John Troyer is the Death Studies Scholar-at-Large and former director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath (UK) and Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website, the Future Cemetery project, and the author of Technologies of the Human Corpse (MIT Press 2020).