Research project Pictorial Knowledge and Lantern Lectures in the 19th-Century Media Culture
A research project between image science and media history.
The project investigates how a new type of public lectures with projected images, lantern lectures, was established in the broader media culture of the later 19th century in Sweden. The central question is: How can the lantern lectures shed light on the image’s historical mediation and multimodal knowledge functions?
Project description
At the end of the 19th century, public lectures with image slides made a great success in Sweden and other countries. The lectures were organized by societies of civil education and entertainment and centred around the magic lantern, a medium for image projection with roots in the 17th century. This project investigates how the hitherto unresearched lantern lectures were established in the broader media culture of the late 19th century in Sweden and how they tied together and mediated the arts and the sciences by presenting and visualizing scholarly subjects such as geography, natural history, and art history. The purpose is to examine the lantern lectures’ historical and critical implications for the picture’s production of knowledge, with focus on its relations to other media. In a framework of image studies, media history, and history of knowledge, the project in three case studies investigates how the lantern lectures
- were historically situated between the arts and the sciences,
- mediated the popular subject of travels around the world together with the illustrated press, and
- mediated art history along with print reproductions of artworks. The three-year project is based on press research and multimodal image-and-text analysis. It develops new perspectives on pictorial knowledge production by bringing together questions about the picture’s societal and medial dissemination, multimodal interaction with text, and historical relations to surrounding media.
Project members
Project managers
Sonya Petersson
Senior lecturer, associate professor, research officer
