Cheryl Spinner
The College of Charleston
Dr. Cheryl Spinner is Adjunct Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the College of Charleston. She holds a doctorate in English and a Certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University, where she was a Nathan J. Perilman Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies and a PhD Lab Scholar in Digital Knowledge. Her current book project Debunk Me Not: Science and Romantic Feeling explores the communities at the margins of normative science, whose supernatural belief systems were written out of Western modernity’s project of secularization in the 19th- and early-20th centuries.
The material I intend to workshop for this seminar comes from my book project tentatively titled Debunk Me Not: Science and Romantic Feeling, which provides a model for what I call intuitive historiographic methods as a way to approach the archives of the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement. The positivist bent of traditional historical analysis I argue is not always useful when assessing whether or not spiritualist testimonies are reliable historical documents.
I have found over the course of my work that magic studies is plagued by the desire to appear as “straight” scholars. As Christopher Lehrich notes: “Academic scholars working on magic have often been strikingly anxious to situate themselves indisputably within a conventional disciplinary framework, as though thereby to ward off the lingering taint of an object of study.” In both writing samples, I broach the question that asks why is academic inquiry about magic, the supernatural, and the spiritual often so devoid of magic? This is a question of writing. So I am thoroughly invested in discovering a write about the practitioners of spiritualist movement that preserves the uncertainty of their beliefs and practices even in the very form and stylistic qualities of my scholarship. I am resistant to a debunking project, and in turn want the magic of scholarship, the magic of the archive, to be communicated in all forms of my writing, both academic and popular.
I might say that The Jewish magician Harry Houdini is the presiding spirit of my work. Houdini is a key player in the history of Spiritualism because, although one of its preeminent debunkers, he also amassed an enormous collection of materials on the subject and during his early years in the late-19th century marketed himself as a Spiritualist performer, which he deeply regretted later in life for taking advantage of the bereaved. I find in his fascination with, and ambivalence about, Spiritualism productive insight into the conflict between spiritualism and science that emerges during this period. I might say he enchants my project, since the idea for my dissertation grew in part out of my decision to attend the Broken Wand/Kaddish ceremony held on the Jewish anniversary of his death (yahrzeit) at his graveside, where I was intrigued to learn that he is buried across the street from the graves of my maternal family
