Resident Graduate Scholar Seminar: Noah Blakemore-Briggs, Political Science, “Spectral Sovereignties: Modern American Spiritualism and the New American Polity”
November 5, 2026
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location
UIC Institute for the Humanities
Calendar
Download iCal FileNoah's project focuses on the political implications ofAmerican metaphysical religion, particularly the Spiritualist movement.Spiritualism began in 1848 and focuses on the possibility of communicating withthe dead. The first part of the project explores the possibilities presented byleaning into what Hannah Arendt called the “weirdness” of the bourgeois publicsphere; a weirdness she compares, aptly enough, to a Spiritualistic séance.Noah argues that within the world alienation identified by Arendt is a new wayof relating to social organization, one already embedded in American politicalinstitutions by Spiritualism. The second part develops three case studiesrelated to spirit communication and its political possibilities: the politicalthought of an Afro-Creole Spiritualist circle in New Orleans; an analysis ofespiritista republicanism in the Mexican revolution; and an ethnographic studyof American Spiritualists. "Spectral Sovereignties" recovers animagined republican polity without any significant binary features.
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Date posted
Jun 23, 2026
Date updated
Jun 23, 2026