Monday, December 4, 2023
7pm ET
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Note: this talk is an expanded version of the one we hosted in our recent Morbid Anatomy International Congress Flea Market and Creative Fair

This 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.

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.

Image: Table levitates during Palladino's séance at home of astronomer Camille Flammarion, France, 25 November 1898. There are two women seated at the table. Eusapia Palladino sits at the far short end.