Time: 7 pm EDT
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE

This lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 5 pm EDT the day of the lecture. Attendees may request a video recording AFTER the lecture takes place by emailing proof of purchase to info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com. Video recordings are valid for 7 days after the date of the lecture.

Ticketholders: a link to the conference is sent out at 5:30 pm EDT on the day of the event to the email used at checkout. Please add info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com to your contacts to ensure that the event link will not go to spam.

PLEASE NOTE: This lecture will be recorded and available for free for our Patreon members at $5/above. Become a Member HERE.

Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. The new book Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science by Alicia Puglionesi, brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences.

Drawing on previously untapped archives of participant-reported data, the book recounts how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. A vast though flawed experiment in democratic science, psychical research gave participants valuable tools with which to study their experiences on their own terms. Academic psychology would ultimately disown this effort as both a scientific failure and a remnant of magical thinking, but its challenge to the limits of science, the mind, and the soul still reverberates today.

Tonight's illustrated lecture will present Puglionesi’s groundbreaking and illuminating research as set forth in her new book.

Alicia Puglionesi is an adjunct instructor in the medicine, science and humanities program at Johns Hopkins University. Her writing has appeared in The Point, Atlas Obscura and Motherboard, among others. She is the author of the novella Krall Krall (2013) and the book Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science (2020).