The 2005 Burnham Award Committee is delighted to award this year's prize to Courtenay Raia's "Ether Theories and Ether Theologies." With verve and creativity, Raia's essay tracks the biography of Sir Oliver Lodge in order to illuminate larger themes related to the birth of "modern" science, religion, and philosophy. Her case study of Lodge—a British experimentalist and theorist—reveals a scientist who was authentically engaged with psychical phenomena, and suggests that many of his contemporaries also understood such investigation to be an important part of their mandate. At the intersection of the body and the soul, the scientific and the religious, Lodge's investigations into the ether aimed at a unitary scientific explanation of all physical things on the boundary between mind and matter. Moving convincingly from late-nineteenth-century accounts of the mysterious powers of an Italian laundry woman to epistemological questions about the nature of matter and energy, Raia paints a compelling portrait of the Victorian "fraternization between physics and metaphysics." Rather than seeking to reduce the supernatural to the material or mundane, Raia shows, Lodge hoped to elevate science to a more profound spiritual plane. In so doing, she reanimates a key transition point in the history of science before the investigation of physical and metaphysical forces were considered virtually antithetical. The Committee was impressed by the depth of Raia's research across published and unpublished sources as well as her ability to move fluidly between physical and psychical science—much like her protagonist.
Courtenay Raia is a History Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles.
2005 Burnham Award Committee: Ellen Herman, Sarah Igo, and Deborah Weinstein