Since the emergence of modern mediumship in the middle of the nineteenth century, science and spiritualism have been interwoven. Sceptics and believers alike have investigated spirit and psychic phenomena to determine its legitimacy. We are delighted to have Professor Christine Ferguson (University of Stirling), and Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck, University of London) as our keynote speakers. Shannon Taggart, internationally acclaimed photographer for The New York Times and Time Magazine, will be in attendance to showcase her exhibition of photographs of Lily Dale, New York, (home to the world's largest Spiritualist commu nity). Nik Taylor and Andy Cooper will be performing a re-enactment of a Victorian Séance followed by a critical discussion with delegates. Nik Taylor is a research magician and performer from the University of Huddersfield and Andy Cooper (performing under the stage name Ashton Carter) is a magician and storyteller specialising in bizarre magic and the recreation of séances. This two-day interdisciplinary conference will explore the history of the intersection of science and spiritualism during the long nineteenth century.

Keynote speaker (I) Christine Ferguson, 'Anna Kingsford (1846-1888) and the Intuitive Science of Occultism'

Feminist, occultist, and one of the first British women to qualify as a medical doctor, Anna Kingsford remains curiously absent from recent studies of science and spiritualism. Although active and esteemed in each of the latter arenas, her contributions here have been repeatedly side-lined by those of spiritualistically-inclined contemporaries such as Oliver Lodge, Alfred Russel Wallace, and William Crookes. This neglect is attributable to more than just the lesser impact of Kingsford's scientific work; it also reflects a wider tendency within spiritualism and science studies to prioritize interactions between professional male investigators and female or socially subordinate mediums, one that both reflects and reproduces the power dynamics of Victorian psychical research itself.

My talk examines how Kingsford sought to dismantle this divide between a masculinized scientific mode and a feminized practice of intuition throughout her eclectic literary output and self-experimentation. Across her visionary, medical, and anti-vivisectional writings, Kingsford advocated an intuitive form of investigation in which the subjectivity of the researcher took centre stage, and where feeling, inward reflection and self-experimentation replaced distanced observation. Actively resistant and hostile to the "new creed of objectivity" (Daston and Galiston 2007; 195) which came to dominate professional science in the latter half of the nineteenth century, she insisted instead that the self was the first and most appropriate subject for occult and scientific research alike. In this conviction, I argue, she emerges as an important if deeply eccentric pioneer of a feminist epistemology of science, one who would assert the impossibility and undesirability of non-situated knowledge.

Keynote speaker (II) Christine Ferguson 'Anna Kingsford (1846-1888) and the Intuitive Science of Occultism'

Feminist, occultist, and one of the first British women to qualify as a medical doctor, Anna Kingsford remains curiously absent from recent studies of science and spiritualism. Although active and esteemed in each of the latter arenas, her contributions here have been repeatedly side-lined by those of spiritualistically-inclined contemporaries such as Oliver Lodge, Alfred Russel Wallace, and William Crookes. This neglect is attributable to more than just the lesser impact of Kingsford's scientific work; it also reflects a wider tendency within spiritualism and science studies to prioritize interactions between professional male investigators and female or socially subordinate mediums, one that both reflects and reproduces the power dynamics of Victorian psychical research itself.

My talk examines how Kingsford sought to dismantle this divide between a masculinized scientific mode and a feminized practice of intuition throughout her eclectic literary output and self-experimentation. Across her visionary, medical, and anti-vivisectional writings, Kingsford advocated an intuitive form of investigation in which the subjectivity of the researcher took centre stage, and where feeling, inward reflection and self-experimentation replaced distanced observation. Actively resistant and hostile to the "new creed of objectivity" (Daston and Galiston 2007; 195) which came to dominate professional science in the latter half of the nineteenth century, she insisted instead that the self was the first and most appropriate subject for occult and scientific research alike. In this conviction, I argue, she emerges as an important if deeply eccentric pioneer of a feminist epistemology of science, one who would assert the impossibility and undesirability of non-situated knowledge.

Keynote Speaker III – Roger Luckhurst 'Stanhope Speer and the Ghost Club Circle: Questions and Methods'

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Last modified 8 March 2019