Stanford University
CESTA

This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
Spiritual Networks 1890-1930

In Britain, America and parts of Europe, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century witnessed the advent of the phenomenon we know today as "spiritual but not religious". Many different sorts of people turned to their own experience and to "spirituality" as they understood it in a general sense, rejecting or standing on the margins of institutional religion. Some seekers held multiple spiritual/religious affiliations. All of this made for interesting and unexpected connections as people sought the like-minded across literary, artistic, religious and spiritual communities. This project will initially take about 250 individuals (primarily spiritual/religious leaders, writers, intellectuals and artists), the majority of them in Britain, but some in North America, Europe, and parts of the British Empire, and will map out the connections between them. The result should throw up some surprising nodes or clusters of activity, as well as some startling connections, which will be mapped visually in a digital humanities project; this proposed spatial history project would complement the monograph I am writing on this subject.

Former Research Assistant:
Charles Foster

Spatial History