On Friday February 1st, Professor Ronen Steinberg will be giving a talk titled “On Phantasmagorias and Talking Dead: Imagining the Effects of Terror in Post-Revolutionary France”. The talk will take place at 3:30PM in the Old Horticulture Conference room, located on the second floor.
In the late 1790s, when many in France were still reeling from that episode of massive repression known as the Reign of Terror, a new type of lantern show, the phantasmagoria, debuted in Paris. This new visual technology enabled the projection of moving images of spirits rising from the dead, and it proved hugely popular, but also politically sensitive.
This talk uses the case of the phantasmagoria in order to examine how contemporaries of the revolutionary era struggled to come to terms with the legacies left in the wake of the Reign of Terror, an event of mass violence that was destructive, to be sure, but also foundational in the emergence of modern French society.
For more information, a PDF version of the flyer posted in Old Horticulture is located at the bottom of this post.