Dear Friends: Please forward to any colleagues you believe may be interested. Flyers may be found the bottom of the page. More info online at http://www.culture.hu-berlin.de/occult/ You are cordially invited to join us on November 14th and 15th in Berlin for the conference: *Looking Through the Occult:* Instrumentation, Esotericism, and Epistemology in the 19th Century /online at *http://www.culture.hu-berlin.de/occult/*/ November 14 & 15, Humboldt University of Berlin, Main Building (Hauptgebäude), Unter den Linden 6—Room 2103 AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE – FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC *pre-register by writing to [log in to unmask]* In recent years the history of science has cast new light on how technical instrumentation in the nineteenth-century shaped conceptions of scientific objectivity as non-subjective and independent of human intervention. A parallel body of research in media studies has demonstrated how the contemporaneous rise of technical media (e.g. telegraphy, photography) informed spiritualistic beliefs that automated, technical inscriptions would provide faithful representation of a transcendental or spiritualistic world. /Looking Through the Occult /brings together scholars in media studies, the history of technology, science studies, and religious studies to consider how these phenomena interrelate. Conference Schedule: *14 November 2014** *9:00 Coffee & snacks* *9:30 Christian Kassung: Opening Remarks 10:00 Bernard Geoghegan: Occult Knowledge and Plain Sight: On the Popular Display of Scientific Wonders Florian Sprenger: Occult Occultism and the Afterlives of /Actio in Distans/ 11:30 Ehler Voss & Erhard Schüttpelz: From Medium to Media: Oliver Lodge’s Radio History Margarida Medeiros: An Historical and Philosophical View on the Purpose of Documenting Non-Observational Matter 15:00 Robert Brain: “A Medium is a Medium is a Medium”: Ectoplasm Images, Psychical Research, and the Futurist Moment” Tessel M. Bauduin: “Modest recording instruments without talent”: Automatism in Surrealism * * 16:30 First Keynote Address John Durham Peters: Nineteenth-century Mormonism between angelic visitations and scientific rationality (and other tales of scrambled modernity) *15 November 2013* 9:30 John Tresch: ‘Matter No More’: Edgar Allan Poe and the Paradoxes of Materialism Simone Natale: The Spectacular Supernatural 11:00 Stephan Gregory: Code und Kontakt. Mythologien der magischen Wirksamkeit Anthony Enns: Spiritualist Writing Machines 14:30 Egil Asprem: Scientific rationalism, occult empiricism? Representations of the microphysical world, ca. 1900 Petra Löffler: Geister der Stadt. Spektrologie urbaner Räume *16:00 *Second Keynote Address Jeremy Stolow: On Mediumnic Lights, X^x Rays, and the Spirit who Photographed Herself 17:30 Closing discussion