Pictorial Knowledge and Lantern Lectures in the 19th-Century Media Culture

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 centered 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 1) were historically situated between the arts and the sciences, 2) mediated the popular subject of travels around the world together with the illustrated press, and 3) 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.