Technologies of Illusion: Enchanting Modernity's Machines

Technologies of Illusion: Enchanting Modernity’s Machines confronts how the

disenchantment of modernity has occluded nineteenth-century Spiritualist archives. By

incorporating literary, visual, and archival methodologies, the dissertation recovers the

non-normative supernatural histories that are preserved within photographs, novels,

and supernatural testimonies. By eschewing scholarly method that is rooted in parsing

out fact from fiction, Technologies of Illusions gives dignity to the Spiritualist artifacts that

eschew such demarcations, and, by extension, the communities who believed in them.