The Occult Body: Science, Psychical Research, and Art, 1870–1920

This project looks at the entanglements between occult(ural) art and the ideas and investigations of physicists, psychical researchers, mathematicians, and other scientists in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Anglophone cultures, especially Britain. I am interested especially in late-Victorian negotiations of the relationship between the physical and material, the physical and metaphysical, and the real and ideal in the arts and the sciences. One strand of research explores how figurative art produced by Spiritualists, Theosophists, and occult practitioners (or artists drawing on occult ideas regardless of belief) mobilised ideas from contemporary science to engage a variety of dynamics and problematics, from the relationship of matter to spirit and body to soul, to the nature of reality and memory and the functioning of artistic genius. Another strand examines how Spiritualist and occult practitioners deployed visual and other media technologies, and especially immersive photographic technologies like stereoscopy, as part of their mediumistic practice — especially their performances for scientific investigators.

Artists of interest include Evelyn De Morgan, G. F. Watts, and Annie Swynnerton, among others. Scientists, science writers, and psychical researchers include F. W. H. Myers, Oliver Lodge, Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait, William Stanley Jevons, William Crookes, William James, Eric Dingwall, Walter Franklin Prince, etc.

The project began with my doctoral research on Evelyn De Morgan (completed 2021). It has since expanded to include my participation in the AHRC-funded project 'The Media of Mediumship: Encountering the Material Culture of Modern Occultism in Britain’s Science, Technology, and Magic Collections’ (in collaboration with Christine Ferguson and Efram Sera-Shriar, 2021–22); my role as PI on an INSBS-funded project on the scientific testing of the Spiritualist medium ‘Margery’ Crandon (2022); a British School at Rome and Paul Mellon Centre fellowship on Annie Swynnerton (2023); a Harvard I Tatti fellowship on Victorian alchemy and Anglo-Florentine networks (2024); a range of podcast episodes and radio appearances; and a book-in-progress on Evelyn De Morgan.

Currently my research is looking at the network of art and ideas surrounding Frederic W. H. Myers, William James, Henri Bergson, Annie Swynnerton, and G. F. Watts.