Science, Spiritualism, Stereoscopy: The Spectacular Photographs of ‘Margery’ Crandon
By Dr. Emma Merkling In late 2022 I began working on an INSBS-funded grant project on the scientific testing of the spiritualist medium Mina ‘Margery’ Crandon in Boston, c. 1925. ‘Margery’ was arguably the best-known medium in America at the time, having been made famous by a series of investigations into her mediumship initially funded […]
S2 Episode 2: Science, (Con)spirituality and COVID-19 with Dr Anna Halafoff
New-age spirituality, wellness and alternative health practices have been cast in a new light as the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded. The relationship between these practices and established or mainstream science and public health has tended to be an uneasy one, and this unease has only increased during the pandemic, with online spiritualist and wellness communities […]
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 […]
Spiritualism, religion and mathematics in the Victorian period
By Sylvia Nickerson In 1884 the English schoolteacher Edwin Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. This book, a social satire, also explores the mathematical concept of dimensionality. Abbott’s characters imagine what it might be like for creatures of one dimension to communicate with creatures of higher or lower dimensions. A major theme is […]
