Performing Science, Mediating Knowledge
Science, Showmanship, and the Performance of Authority in the Long Nineteenth Century
Edited by Nele Wynants Edited by Eva Andersen
Hardback (Published)
(September 2026)
ISBN: 9782503616643
7 x 10 inches
Price: $94.00
On back order
This volume explores how science was staged, visualized and embodied in nineteenth and early twentieth century lectures, fairs, world exhibitions, and magic lantern shows. Bridging performance studies, media history, and science communication, it reveals how gestures, rhetoric, and visual spectacle shaped public engagement with science.
Performing Science, Mediating Knowledge examines how science was staged, embodied, and made visible in the long nineteenth century — a period defined by rapid technological transformation and an expanding public culture of knowledge. Moving across settings such as lecture halls, world’s fairs, opera houses, scientific congresses, and travelling fairgrounds, this volume traces the heterogeneous performance cultures through which scientific ideas circulated, were challenged, and gained authority.
Drawing on performance studies, media history, and the histories of science and knowledge, the chapters analyse how rhetoric address, bodily gestures, visual media, scenography, and audience interaction shaped both the credibility and the appeal of scientific claims.
Foregrounding the wide range of actors involved — scientists, showpeople, artists, lecturers — and the various media and venues through which science entered the public sphere, the chapters reveal how scientific ideas were shaped through practices of staging, and how science functioned as a cultural practice embedded in the political, social, and aesthetic dynamics of the nineteenth century.
Introduction
Performing Science, Mediating Knowledge: Introduction
Nele Wynants
Part I: Staging Science: Actors, Networks, and Circulations
From Dispositifs to Actor-Networks: The Popular Science Exhibition Networks of Eric Stuart Bruce, the Magic Lantern, and other Actors (1880–1914)
Joe Kember
Concerto for Sax and Velpeau: Performing Medicine with Exotic Plants and Powerful Machinery in Paris of the Second Empire
Irina Podgorny
Performing Electromagnetism and Electricity on Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Stages
Kornélia Deres
Objects of a Human Display: Visual Representations of Smoon, Cakus, Yunka, and Stinée (1846–1856)
Parveen Kanhai
Part II: Performance Venues: Theatrical Setting, Space, and Spectacle
Darkened Rooms: Between the Spaces of Victorian Science and Illusion
Iwan Rhys Morus
‘An Exhibit of Thoughts by Spoken Language’ at the Auxiliary World’s Congresses of the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition
Charlotte Bigg and Thomas Mougey
Chemistry at the Opera: Spectacle and the Science of Anti-Flammability at the Paris Opéra (1820s–1880s)
Sofie Lachapelle and Kimberly Francis
Imbrications of Blindness, Heredity, and Performance in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century Theatre
Daniel I. Abdalla and Kirsten E. Shepherd
Exploring the Intersection of Art, Knowledge, and Exhibition: Interview with Wesley Meuris
Wesley Meuris
Part III: Objects, Devices, and Performing Media
Performing in the Auditorium: Scientific Lantern Lectures between the Popular and the Academic (1890–1914)
Sabine Lenk
Animating the Past: The Magic Lantern Travelogues of Charles Buls (1837–1914) as Sites of Knowledge Mediation
Eleonora Paklons
The Popularization of Physique Amusante and Illusionism Practices in France: Illusionist Literature and Paradigms between Science, Games, and Magic (1800–1850)
Thibaut Rioult
‘Thing Knowledge’: Understanding the Transit and Transfer of Binocular Vision and Motion Perception Principles in Nineteenth-Century Science and Popular Culture
Deirdre Feeney
- Edited by Nele Wynants
- Edited by Eva Andersen
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