Efram Sera-Shriar

a red and orange box is sitting on the floor ALT: a red and orange box is sitting on the floor

I think I may have outdone myself with the title: "Psychic Force or Psychic Farce?"

I also think you are both excellent scholars!

Assistant Professor in 18th Century Literature at Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin Discover an exciting academic career path as a Assistant Professor in 18th Century Literature at jobs.ac.uk. Don't miss out on this job opportunity - apply today!

Come and join us!!

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQS657/a...

Lecturer in Visual and Material Cultures (R&T) at University of Glasgow Searching for an academic job? Explore this Lecturer in Visual and Material Cultures (R&T) opening on jobs.ac.uk! Click to view more details and browse other academic jobs.

Come and work with us at Glasgow! Full time permanent post in History of Art: lecturer in material and visual culture with specialism in dress history or textile history. Details below 👇

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQR311/l...

A hand-drawn diagram showing the set up for a seance that the naturalist TH Huxley attended in Jan of 1874. Huxley initially resisted the idea of investigating spiritualism, but eventually capitulated as a result of AR Wallace's and Wm Crookes' respective writings on spirits and psychic forces.

I've added a little slide at the end of my seminar today to showcase my adorable little snuggle monster.

Goths for Breakfast: Charity Teach-a-thon A full day of back to back classes and workshops on Gothic themes to raise money for the charity Magic Breakfast

This Saturday is the Goths for Breakfast charity day. Goths unite! We're raising money for Magic Breakfast to feed hungry kids with a teaching marathon of fascinating talks and writing workshops. Pop in and out as you like - the talks are recorded!

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1982926549...

While reading about William Crookes' psychic experiments in 1871, I found an entry where a critic compares D.D. Home's floating accordion to the stage magician Alexander Hermann's floating wand. Crookes purposefully ignores magicians because they undermine his findings. Hermann's posters are fun!

a cartoon of a person wearing boxing gloves sitting in front of a computer screen ALT: a cartoon of a person wearing boxing gloves sitting in front of a computer screen

I've just discovered that Homestar Runner is back online and it continues to be hilarious. Those Strong Bad emails are the best.

homestarrunner.com

Romancing the Gothic 2026 Online Conference CFP More Terrors than her Reason Could Justify A 200th Anniversary Celebration of Ann Radcliffe’s Posthumous Publications 22nd/23rd August 2026 2026 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of An…

Romancing the Gothic has an online conference this year.

We're celebrating Radcliffe's posthumous publications with a conference that looks at women in the Gothic and horror and people of marginalised genders in Gothic and horror.

Join us!
romancingthegothic.com/2025/10/15/r...

The Worth Library's Research Fellowships for 2026 have just been advertised.

Find out more at edwardworthlibrary.ie/research-fel...

Please repost! @bodleian.ox.ac.uk @cerl-community.bsky.social @britishlibrary.bsky.social @wellcometrust.bsky.social @harvard.edu

Curling Gate might be the most amazing Canadian sports controversy of the decade. And the memes are wonderful!

Call for papers for event on children in early modern institutions. Contact Paula Plastic.

Call for papers - growing up in the early modern world!

Here's a snippet from an article in the Saturday Review from 1871, where the journalist is making fun of William Crookes experiments on psychic force.

Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.

CALL FOR PITCHES

@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.

Details below!

Great... now I'm hooked. That's my morning spent 😂

In my lecture and seminars this week, we will be exploring the Lizzie Borden murder case. I taught this last semester too at the MA level and it was wildly popular. I plan to also discuss the emergence of a dark tourism culture in Fall River, MA, which was the setting of the murders.

The walls of Katsema, Nigeria, 1930. Photo by Elizabeth Wilhelmina Ness/Royal Geographical Society

So pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded PhD opportunity co-supervised with Royal Geographical Society (with IBG):

"Collaborative Research as Pedagogical Method: Reinterpreting Photographic Collections at the RGS-IBG"

Deadline: 30 April. Full details here: lnkd.in/euQvMmrR

It does, but to be fair, I'm already paid to play with video games and talk about ghosts. Why push the envelop further? 😂

I get dozens of suggestions to work at Lego!

It's the first day of term and it is time for my lecture on Silent Spring and the dangers of chemical pesticides like DDT. Here are some old adverts to enjoy!

2026 HSS Dissertation Travel Grant Applications are Open We are excited to announce that applications for the new HSS Dissertation Travel Grant are now open. This grant supports dissertation research activities, with an emphasis on travel to sources, for PhD students in the history of science and technology working on their dissertation proposal or dissertation itself. Graduate student members from any university are eligible to apply. The application includes a two-page, single-spaced research proposal, two-page cv, a short budget detailing anticipated expenses, and a letter of support from a faculty member in the applicant's program. Individual grants may be up to US$2,500. Applications will be open until Tuesday, March 31.

HSS Dissertation Travel Grant to support travel to sources for PhD students in history of science and technology working on their dissertation. Grants may be up to US$2,500. Grad students from any university are eligible
Deadline Tuesday, March 31.
hssonline.org/page/dissert...
#HPS

Shryock Medal Shryock Medal Graduate students are invited to enter the Shryock Medal Essay Contest. The medal honors Richard Harrison Shryock (1893–1972), a pioneer among historians interested in the history of med...

Hey, do you know a grad student who's written a good history of medicine paper? Suggest that they submit it for the AAHM Shryock prize. histmed.org/shryock-medal/ Deadline extended to 15 Feb.

We've been receiving some wonderful book proposals of late for @incsa.bsky.social's book series with Clemson University Press. But you can never have too much of a good thing. If you have a monograph or edited collection, consider sending it to us!

Details 👇
libraries.clemson.edu/press/series...

Lecturer in Early Medieval History | King's College London

Anyway, good news! Open-ended lectureship in early medieval history at KCL.

www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/136727-...

CALL FOR PAPERS: PERFORMING EVIL: the mediation and display of diabolic spectres, 1700-2000'. 4 & 5 June 2026, Leuven. This conference explores the tangled histories of supernatural, diabolic evil and all kinds of spectral apparitions in the last three centuries – Walter Scott’s ‘malignant and unhappy beings’. Specifically, it is interested in how and why ghosts, spirits and related apparitional phenomena were framed as diabolic, demonic or malign manifestations from the afterlife. Diabolic connotations of ghosts and spirits did meaningful cultural work. They were mobilised to discredit ghost beliefs and spiritual practices, to delegitimise competing beliefs, or to invest doctrinal arguments with occult authority. They could also function as tools of scepticism and ridicule as well as triggers of wonder, fear and religiosity. Put differently, the nexus of ghosts and evil is deeply historical. And it was often articulated through performative means: in gestures and expressions of (dis)belief, in visual and textual representations, in séance rooms, on the stage and on the page. Emerging from this nexus are theatrical spirits of evil, staged, embodied, and made legible through mediation and display. In this sense, every ghost is a theatrical ghost. Through the focus on the construction and staging of diabolic spirits, this conference aims to develop a methodological framework for studying historical forms of occultism and demonology more broadly in terms of performance.

Exploring how the relationship of spectrality and evil has shifted in shape over time and across different cultures, the conference invites contributions that can consider a wide range of historical actors – clerics, mediums, ghost-hunters, debunkers, necromancers, stage performers, eyewitnesses. This conference aims to study cultural intersections and interactions to arrive at a more granular understanding of discursive, practical and material connections between spirits and evil. At the same time this lens zooms out, making visible broader dynamics of knowledge construction in specific historical moments. How, for instance, did hauntings and possessions shape communities and audiences? How did religious or folkloric ideas about the devil inform spectral encounters? We hope to bring together historians, art historians, theatre and literary scholars, folklorists and anthropologists from every stage in their career around the above questions. We welcome 20-minute papers on topics that include but are by no means limited to: - making spectral evil visible: performance, arts, media, technologies, popular cultures - making spectral evil invisible: popular and occult knowledge circulation - performing (un)belief: practices and rhetoric, summoning and debunking on the stage (from popular stages to the lecture hall and the laboratory) - materiality of spectres: the function of bodies and objects - diabolic spirits and (intellectual, vernacular, theological, folkloric) ideas about morality, mortality and temporality - occult performance and ‘cultural scripts’ of ghost encounters (from necromancy to poltergeists) - affect and emotions: fear, grief, trauma… and hope Send abstracts (c.250 words) and bios (c.100 words) to kristof.smeyers@kuleuven.be before 21 March 2026. Please do get in touch if you have any questions.

Hi everyone, I'm organising a conference in Leuven, 4-5 June, and you're all invited*! It's called 'Performing evil: the mediation and display of diabolic spectres 1700-2000' and here is the call for papers (get in touch if you'd like a pdf!). Please share widely!

*to submit an abstract before 21/3

I'd like to thank Efram from 8 years ago for taking such meticulous notes so that Efram of today would not need to waste a day going through archives all over again. That old Efram was real smart. Efram of today could learn something from him...

I forgot how wonderful William Crookes' experiments in the early 1870s with the medium D.D. Home were. I've revisited them for some new research, and I'm geeking out hard right now...