Lucy Kimiko Hawkinson Traverse

Lucy Kimiko Hawkinson Traverse is a Fellow at the Institute for Research in the
Humanities and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a broad modernist interested in the
transatlantic visual culture of the long nineteenth century, the history and
theory of photography, the gendering and imaging of psychosomatic
eccentricity, and visual experiences of the urban. Her dissertation,
“Ectoplasmic Modernities: Materialization Photography at the Turn of the
Century,” explores the transatlantic interest in psychical research at the
fin de siècle, arguing that the “ectoplasmic” forces us to rethink
modernism’s visual and conceptual relationship to the occult, and
photography’s relationship to the history of science. This project has been
supported by Chancellor’s Fellowships and a CLIR/Mellon Fellowship for
Dissertation Research in Original Sources. Work from her dissertation
research will appear in the forthcoming anthology Photography in Doubt
(Routledge, 2015).