Jeremy Stolow

senior fellow
EURIAS cohort 2017/2018
discipline Cultural Studies
Associate Professor (tenured), Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montreal

Research project

Picturing Aura

 

This project explores the history of efforts to photograph "the aura" – a normally invisible vital energy radiating from the body – and the lives of such pictures in psychic research, alternative medicine, the New Age spiritual marketplace, and larger arenas of mass media and popular culture. Drawing upon media archaeology, science studies, religious studies, and visual culture studies, the project traces roughly 120 years of evolution of aura-imaging technologies and practices, their global circulation, and their ambiguous relationships with sanctioned techniques of scientific visualization, on the one hand, and traditions of clairvoyant perception and divination, on the other. The project’s goal is to produce a book-length account of a remarkable, and much-neglected, transnational history of non-orthodox uses of visual media, and on that basis to intervene in larger theoretical debates about what connects and distinguishes religion, techno-science, and visual culture in our contemporary, ‘post-secular’ modernity.

 

 

Biography


Jeremy Stolow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. He holds a Ph.D in Social and Political Thought from York University. His main research interests focus on how modern media transform religious ideas, experiences, and practices.

 

 

Selected publications

 

'Mediumnic Lights, Xx-Rays, and the Spirit Who Photographed Herself', Critical Inquiry, vol. 42, no. 4, 2016, pp. 923-951.


'Guest Editorial: Visible/Invisible: Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere', with A. Boutros, Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 40, no. 1, 2015, pp. 3-10.

 

Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between, (ed.), Fordham University Press, New York, 2013.

 

'Le synthétique sacré. Réflexions sur les aspects matériels des textes juifs orthodoxes', Terrain, no. 59, 2012, pp. 120-137.

 

Orthodox By Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010.

 

 

institut

junior fellow
EURIAS promotion 2015/2016
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS-KNAW)
discipline Neurosciences
2015
junior fellow
EURIAS promotion 2013/2014
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS-KNAW)
discipline Archaeology
2013
junior fellow
EURIAS promotion 2017/2018
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS-KNAW)
discipline History
2017
junior fellow
EURIAS promotion 2015/2016
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS-KNAW)
discipline Political Science
2015