Book Chapter: Academic and public lantern lectures in the Netherlands circa 1900 through the lens of the educational dispositif by Jamilla Notebaard and Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the optical lantern was becoming an ubiquitous educational tool. This was the case for university lectures but also for illustrated public lectures, also known as lantern lectures, organized by a range of institutions and associations. In the Netherlands, even if the adoption of the technology was somewhat late, academic institutions developed dedicated spaces for lantern slide production and projection, such as the botanical laboratories of the state universities of Groningen, Leiden and Utrecht. In comparison, Dutch associations developed procedures to enable a wider access to lantern slide projection such as the creation of “lending offices” which coordinated the circulation of lantern slide sets during the lecture season.
To better understand the practice of knowledge transmission by means of the optical lantern, our focus is not just on the technological implications of the lantern, but also on the historical, institutional, and performative contexts in which it was embedded. Therefore, this paper examines the lantern lecture as a historically situated performance using Frank Kessler’s concept of educational magic lantern dispositif. In particular, we will focus on the relationship between the technology (i.e., the optical lantern) and the audiences (i.e., students and general public): how did historical stakeholders use the lantern to communicate knowledge? How did the lantern influence the positioning of the audience? By comparing the academic and public lantern lecture dispositifs, this paper will argue that the lantern was a versatile instrument capable of informing, persuading, demonstrating, and entertaining.

Jamilla Notebaard and Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves, “Academic and public lantern lectures in the Netherlands circa 1900 through the lens of the educational dispositif,” in Objects of Understanding: Historical Perspectives on Material Artefacts and Practices in Science Education, ed. Peter Heering and Roland Wittje (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2025), 199–216.

Publisher’s website: https://www.steiner-verlag.de/en/Objects-of-Understanding/9783515137881