Lindsay DiCuirci Awarded Spring 2025 Dresher Center Fellowship

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 16:17:17 -0500

Congratulations to English faculty Lindsay DiCuirci on being awarded a Spring 2025 fellowship from UMBC's Dresher Center for the Humanities! She will use the fellowship to continue work on her scholarly project, “The Vital Page: Spiritualist Print Culture and Phantasms of Reform in the Nineteenth-Century U.S." Dr. DiCuirci discusses her work in more detail in the message below:

“The Vital Page: Spiritualist Print Culture and Phantasms of Reform in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.,” is a study of the relationship between spiritualism, print culture and attempts at radical social reform between 1840 and 1870. It asks two key questions: How did a widely held belief in communication with the dead shape nineteenth-century reform efforts? What were the perceived affordances of print in bringing the spiritualist and reformist messages together? Spiritualists believed in the ability to communicate with the dead through spirit circles, trance states, and other forms of receptivity. For a community whose practices were based in the experiences of listening, feeling, and speaking, spiritualists contributed a surprisingly large body of print to the nineteenth-century marketplace. Their beliefs also intersected with the movement to abolish slavery, capital punishment reform, universal suffrage, women's liberation, and labor organizing, among other efforts. My book will look at the print ties that bound the spiritualist movement to these radical reforms and also to the biases that ultimately frayed those ties and undermined the spiritualist ideal of "harmonia."