Monday, March 24, 2025 · 12 - 1 PM

The Dresher Center’s CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting new work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting.

The Page Electric: Writing Mediums and Radical Reform in the 19th-Century US

Lindsay DiCuirci, Associate Professor, English

This talk will illuminate the practices, politics, and print forms of writing mediums--writers who believed they were being guided by spirits--in the mid-nineteenth-century U.S. With a focus on spirit letters, clairvoyant medical guides, and trance poetry, Lindsay DiCuirci will consider how writing mediums sought social reform through epistemic rupture and compositional experimentation. Centered in the "burned-over district" of western New York in the 1850s, these mediums were not only channeling the dead but also challenging the living to reimagine the socio-political order, tackling issues like abolition, women's liberation, and prison reform. The talk will conclude with a reflection on the methods that Humanists use–and avoid–to write about spiritual matters and experiences in the past. How should scholars take spirit communications seriously as “evidence,” write about them as phenomena, and approach them with something other than incredulity?

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