The ghost-themed optical exhibition was very popular in the nineteenth century: from Robertson’s Phantasmagoria in post-Revolutionary Paris to Pepper’s Ghost at the London Polytechnic in the 1860s, audiences rushed to…

The optical lantern was the central medium through which Art History professor Willem Vogelsang (1875-1954) taught his students ‘how to see’. As the first ordinarius in Art History in the…

From the sensational ghost lecture of John Henry Pepper to Edison’s phonograph, and from illustrated astronomy lectures to the microscopic projection of the cholera bacillus, Dutchman L.K. Maju delivered popular…

da Rocha Gonçalves, Dulce. “On the Trail of 19th Century Science Performers: The Case of L. K. Maju.” Sage Public Understanding of Science Blog (blog), October 21, 2020. https://sagepus.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-trail-of-19th-century-science.html. Complementary…

Sarah Dellmann & Frank Kessler (ed.) A Million Pictures. Magic Lantern Slides in the History of Learning. New Barnet: John Libbey, 2020. Proceedings from 2017 A Million Pictures conference in Utrecht….

The following text is a working paper, which means that it is predominantly a ‘reconnaissance report’ prompted by the project’s first case study, art historian Prof. Dr. Willem Vogelsang. In…