Book Launch and Talk with Jeremy Stolow

Join the Media History Research Centre for the last event of their Montreal Media History Seminar. Professor Jeremy Stolow will give a lecture about his latest book, Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography (MIT Press). The talk will be followed by a reception.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeremy Stolow is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, 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).

ABOUT THE BOOK

Picturing Aura (MIT Press, 2025) offers a historical, anthropological, and philosophical study of modern efforts to visualize that hidden radiant force encompassing the living body known as our aura. This book chronicles the rise and global spread of modern instruments and techniques of picturing aura, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how its images are put to work in the diverse realms of psychical research, esotericism, art photography, popular culture, and the New Age alternative medical and spiritual marketplace.

These sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting histories — shaped by exchanges among professionals and amateurs, scientists and occultists, countercultural artist and entrepreneurs, metropolitans and hinterland figures — show how the aura operates as a boundary object: something ontologically plural and somehow serviceable to the varying tasks and making art, healing bodies, and mapping technologies, and images migrations, while also reflecting on the very enterprise of picturing aura and the challenges it poses to settled assumptions about religion, science and art.