Episode 217 – Books, Spirits, and Hysteria, with Asti Hustvedt

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Researcher Asti Hustvedt joins Phil and JF to discuss a talk she gave at the Lily Dale Symposium this year entitled "Bibliophantoms." The question: What does it mean to "get lost" in a book? Asti's answer, drawing on her research in nineteenth-century neuroscience and spirit mediumship, amounts to a genuine weirding of the act of reading. Asti Hustvedt is an independent scholar and writer with a PhD in French literature. Her work examines the entangled histories of science, psychology, literature, and the occult, with a particular focus on hysteria and Spiritualism. She is the author of Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris, named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times and a…