Spotlight! Symposium (Fall 2023)

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 12:35:18 -0500

The fall 2023 Spotlight! Symposium, titled Beyond the Veil: Making Sense of the Spirit World, aimed to explore the history of human interaction (beliefs and practices) with supernatural, para-normal, mystic, and psychic phenomena, as well as the intersection of race, spiritualities, magic, mysticism and feminist expression with the otherworldly. The inspiration for the theme came from the Library’s Special Collections’ holdings, including the Eileen J. Garrett Para-psychology Foundation Collection.

Here below, you can find all the recordings from the most recent Symposium.

Julie Saylor: Mediums, Magicians, and the Ouija Board: A Spiritualist History of Baltimore

Toya Smith: Hoodoo is Black Culture: Ancestor Veneration in the Everyday

Orilonise Yarborough: Temporality, Time Jumping and the Space Time Continuum of Black Oral History

Hess Love: We’ve Always Banked on Survival: The History of Hoodoo and Climate Resilience

Shannon Taggart: Séance: Spiritualism, Photography and the Search for Ectoplasm

Dr. Lindsay DiCuirci: Re-forming the Dead: Abolitionist Iconoclasm and the Spirit Circle