Picturing Aura: A Visual Biography

Round table followed by a discussion of the book, Picturing Aura (MIT Press, 2025), by Jeremy Stolow, professor of communication studies at Concordia University in Montreal and 2025-2026 fellow-researcher at Paris IAS, organised by the Warburg Institute, a research centre affiliated with the University of London, and the Vasari Centre for Research in Art and Technology at Birkbeck, University of London.

Event on-site and online, in English.
Registration is required to participate, whether online or on-site, via the following link

Presentation

Picturing Aura (MIT Press 2025), is a historical, anthropological, and philosophical study of modern efforts to visualize the hidden radiant force encompassing the living body known as the aura. It chronicles the rise and global spread of modern instruments and techniques of picturing aura, exploring how its images are put to work in psychical research, esotericism, art photography, popular culture, and the New Age alternative medical and spiritual marketplace. It follows exchanges and conflicts among scientists and occultists, countercultural artists and entrepreneurs, metropolitans and hinterland figures – to show the aura as a boundary object serviceable to the tasks of making art, healing bodies, and mapping a hidden cosmos. In so doing, the book reflects on the challenges posed by attempts to picture aura for settled assumptions about religion, science, and art. 

The author, Jeremy Stolow, will be joined by guests : Alison Wright (UCL), Christopher Pinney (UCL), and Richard Noakes (Exeter), moderated by John Tresch (Warburg Institute).

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