It chronicles the rise and global spread of modern instruments and techniques of picturing aura, exploring how its images are put to work in psychical research, esotericism, art photography, popular culture, and the New Age alternative medical and spiritual marketplace.
It follows exchanges and conflicts among scientists and occultists, countercultural artists and entrepreneurs, metropolitans and hinterland figures, showing how the aura operates as a boundary object serviceable to the diverse tasks of making art, healing bodies, and mapping a hidden cosmos.
In so doing, the book reflects on the challenges posed by attempts to picture aura for settled assumptions about religion, science, and art.
Join us for a conversation with the author and invited respondents: Justine Bakker (assistant professor in Comparative Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen), Birgit Meyer (professor at the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University), and Mattijs van de Port (professor at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, UvA).
About Jeremy Stolow
Jeremy Stolow is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, where he teaches and conducts research on religion and media, the history of technology, occultism and science, and visual culture.
In addition to his latest book, Picturing Aura (MIT Press 2025), he is the author of Orthodox By Design (U of California Press 2010) and Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between (Fordham U Press, 2013). For 2025-26, he is a fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.
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