Published by Efram Sera-Shriar:

a composite image of portraits of Professor Christine Ferguson, Dr Efram Sera-Shriar and Dr Emma Merkling

S2 Episode 1 – Fingerprinting Ghosts: Science, Technology & the Occult with The Media of Mediumship Project Team

The Media of Mediumship project is running jointly at the University of Stirling and the Science Museum Group. The project team comprises Principal Investigator Professor Christine Ferguson, Co-Investigator Dr Efram Sera-Shriar and Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Emma Merkling. In this very spooky episode, Christine, Efram and Emma tell us how from the late-Victorian era, novel technologies of the period – including photographic cameras, radio transmitters and devices for producing and recording different types of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays – were used to explore what we now think of as the ‘supernatural’. The team show that during this period, phenonema such as the ability of a medium to channel the spirits of the dead, or the physical manifestations of this ability such as the production of ectoplasm, were open to scientific debate, having not yet fallen outside the boundaries of legitimate scientific study. Similarly, what phenomena it was possible for

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