Science on a Screen: Assessing the Magic Lantern's Transnational Role in Science Communication

Abstract This co-editorial Introduction presents the papers gathered in this special issue. After outlining the functions of magic lanterns and projected lantern slide images, it discusses the international contributing authors' theoretical starting points and their historical investigations of projection lanterns' roles in knowledge communication, understood as co-production, across the 19th century and in the early decades of the 20th century. The articles in this special issue variously map historical geographies of teaching and learning through visual and verbal lantern lecture performances across several disciplines and in the contexts of professionalising academic and other, related spaces and communities. The epistemological importance of lantern technologies and practices in expanding and shifting conceptual, and physical, spaces of knowledge and in the emergent human and physical sciences, is argued for.