This website is run by Dr. Andreas Sommer, a historian working on the interrelations of the sciences and magic. My Wellcome Trust-funded doctoral thesis (University College London, 2013) reconstructed the links between psychical research and experimental psychology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it won an award from the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
I have held research posts at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and reviewed article manuscripts for journals like History of Science, Medical History, Science in Context, History of Psychology, and History of the Human Sciences, and of book manuscripts for University of Chicago Press and Springer. I was also a history advisor for the BBC drama series, The Living and The Dead.
I’m currently working on a book which updates and revises my doctoral work by reconstructing the close entanglement of the ‘spooky’ side of science and modern psychology during the latter’s infancy in Europe and the US.
‘Forbidden Histories’ is an effort to communicate work in the academic history of science and medicine to a broader audience. I am currently producing the first episodes of a Youtube video series on magic in the history of the sciences (you can view the first episode here).
Follow me on Twitter, and connect to Forbidden Histories on Facebook
If you want to email me you can write to sommer@forbiddenhistories.com.
Some of my publications:
Edited journal special section
- (2014) ‘Psychical research in the history of science and medicine’, Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 48, 38-111.
Journal articles & Chapters in edited volumes
- (forthcoming, 2021). Conflicts and complexities: Medical science, exceptional experiences, and the perils of simplistic history. In A. Moreira‐Almeida, B. P. Mosqueiro, & D. Bhugra (Eds.), Spirituality and Mental Health Across Cultures (Oxford Cultural Psychiatry). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- (2020). James and psychical research in context. In A. Klein (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of William James. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199395699.013.37 (Epub ahead of print) [PDF link].
- (2018). Geisterglaube, Aufklärung und Wissenschaft – Historiographische Skizzen zu einem westlichen Fundamentaltabu. In H. Schwenke (Ed.), Jenseits des Vertrauten. Facetten Transzendenter Erfahrungen (pp. 183-216). Freiburg i. Br.: Verlag Karl Alber [PDF link].
- (2016). Are you afraid of the dark? Notes on the psychology of belief in histories of science and the occult. European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, 18, 105-122 [PDF link].
- (2015, with Pascal Le Maléfan). Léon Marillier and the veridical hallucination in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century French psychology and psychopathology. History of Psychiatry, 26, 418-432 [PDF link].
- (2014). Psychical research in the history and philosophy of science. An introduction and review. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 48, 38-45 [PDF link].
- (2013). Normalizing the supernormal: The formation of the ‘Gesellschaft für Psychologische Forschung’ (‘Society for Psychological Research’), c. 1886–1890. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 49, 18–44 [PDF link].
- (2013). Spiritualism and the origins of modern psychology in late nineteenth-century Germany. The Wundt-Zöllner debate. In C. M. Moreman (Ed.), The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking with the Dead in America and Around the World (Vol. 1, pp. 55-72). Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
- (2012). Psychical research and the origins of American psychology: Hugo Münsterberg, William James and Eusapia Palladino. History of the Human Sciences, 25, 23–44 [PDF link].
- (2012). Policing epistemic deviance: Albert von Schrenck-Notzing and Albert Moll. Medical History, 56, 255–276 [PDF link].
- (2011). Professional heresy: Edmund Gurney (1847–1888) and the study of hallucinations and hypnotism. Medical History, 55, 383–388 [PDF link].
Book reviews
- (2018). Krister Dylan Knapp. William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity. Isis, 109, 410-411 [open access PDF manuscript file].
- (2015). Peter Lamont, Extraordinary Beliefs: A Historical Approach to a Psychological Problem. British Journal for the History of Science, 48, 707-708.
- (2012). M. Brady Brower, Unruly Spirits. The Science of Psychic Phenomena in Modern France. Social History of Medicine, 25, 247-248.
- (2011). Trevor Hamilton, Immortal Longings. F.W.H. Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death. Medical History, 55, 433-435.
- (2011). Heather Wolffram, The Stepchildren of Science. British Journal for the History of Science, 44, 144–146.
- (2011). Stefan Schweizer, Anthropologie der Romantik. History of Psychiatry, 22, 369–370.
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