Barbara Ferguson
My focus is the discussions surrounding science and Spiritualism, widely publicized in the late decades of the 1800s. The language of the increasingly heated debate sought to demarcate what constituted legitimate science and its practitioners, with the contested territory being, in essence, the boundaries of the human mind and body. Carried by the print media to an unprecedented number of literate readers, the ‘sides’ of this conversation echoed through the public consciousness and English literature for decades.
Additional research interests include Victoriana in general, pedagogy, book culture/print history, speculative fiction, and modern pop culture, especially the evolution of folkloric monsters.