Calendar of Speakers and Events
All events are held at The Bishop Bar in downtown Bloomington from 5:30-7:30. Entry is 21+ and proof of vaccination is required.
JAN Weds the 25th Sean Grattan (University of Arizona)
TITLE: Queer Goblins: As If There's Any Other Kind
FEB Weds the 22nd Philip Longo (University of California Santa Cruz)
TITLE: Circles of Sex: The Occult Roots of Gay Liberation
MAR Weds the 29th Hannah Zeavin (Indiana University-Bloomington)
TITLE: The Cult and Occult of Psychoanalysis
APR Weds the 19th Tithi Bhattacharya (Purdue University)
TITLE: Deadly Spaces: Ghosts, Histories and Colonial Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Bengal
MAY Weds the 3rd Kirin Wachter-Grene (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) & Closing Party
TITLE: Dirty Meditations on Coil's Sex Magick
Series Description
Magic is everywhere. From sage smudging witches to the sorcery schools of young adult fantasy series, magic makes up a significant part of contemporary culture and yet has no theory of its own. This lecture series will engage a range of topics in the esoteric and the occult with the intention of developing a platform for occultural studies in the humanities.
Our theme sets in motion a range of ostensibly opposed concepts: science and religion, the material and the immaterial, fact and fabulation, spirituality and sexuality. Engaging scholars, artists, and practitioners in an examination of these binary terms, we continue the critique of nature as a timeless given undertaken by feminists, ecocritics, and science studies scholars for several decades, but with particular attention to the recent wave of scholars of color for whom the distinction between science and its folk opposites is itself a mythological construction and a prop for coloniality. Topics in this series move in several ways through the undoing of these binaries: by taking seriously the variety of esoteric sciences as modes of knowledge-production and world-making; by considering the occult dimensions of nature, or what might emerge by approaching nature aesthetically, affectively, spiritually, supernaturally, or from what Sylvia Wynter calls the “demonic grounds” of practices marginal to the formal sciences; and finally by looking at the weirdness of science-itself, its own occulted aspects. All lectures will take place on Wednesday afternoons at Bishop Bar.
