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This illustrated talk by Asti Hustvedt 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.