New Book Release: Ghosts and Things by Aviva Briefel, PhD ’00

Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth Century Spiritualism by Aviva Briefel, PhD ’00, was recently released by Cornell University Press. Aviva is currently the Edward Little Professor of the English Language and Literature and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College. A description of the book is included below: 
 
“Ghosts and Things argues that Victorians turned to the dead to understand the material culture of their present. With the rise of spiritualism in Britain in the early 1850s, séances invited participants to contact ghosts using material things, from ordinary household furniture to specialized technologies invented to register the presence of spirits. In its supernatural object lessons, Victorian spiritualism was not just a mystical movement centered on the dead but also a practical resource for learning how to negotiate the uncanniness of life under capitalism…”
 
More information can be found on the publisher’s page here.