Dante and the Ouija Board
The Researchers
Fabio CamillettiLink opens in a new window is Professor of Italian literature at the 天美传媒. His research focuses on Dante鈥檚 afterlife in modern European culture, with particular attention to the nineteenth-century and the Pre-Raphaelites. He has also extensively studied the connections between Dante scholarship, Occulture, and spectrality, as well as Spiritualism, the Gothic and occult practices in Italian and European literary culture. His work has explored the s茅ance as a device for mediating literary and artistic agency, alongside the longer tradition of eidolopoeia - i.e. the invocation, imitation or representation of the voices and figures of the dead.
The Challenge
Recent developments in generative AI have revived an apparently novel question: can the dead create new works? Yet posthumous creation has a long, largely forgotten history. From the nineteenth century onwards, Spiritualist mediums produced texts, music and images allegedly dictated by deceased authors and artists through automatic writing, planchettes and Ouija boards. These practices raised fundamental questions about authorship, creativity and agency: who speaks when a dead author鈥檚 voice is channelled by another person? They also disrupted Romantic ideals of individual genius, often through gendered and socially inverted forms of literary ventriloquism. Professor Camilletti's research addresses this neglected archive as a historical laboratory for questions that AI now makes urgent, examining how spirit writings challenged the boundaries between human and non-human agency, author and medium, presence and absence.
Our Approach
Professor Camilletti adopts a transnational, interdisciplinary approach centred on Italy, where spirit writings proliferated from the nineteenth century onwards and frequently involved canonical authors, above all Dante. His research combines literary history, media history and the study of Spiritualism and Occulture to reconstruct the cultural genealogy of mediated posthumous creation. Particular attention is paid to automatic writing and the Ouija board as technologies of communication with the dead, giving uncanny concreteness to the literary tradition of eidolopoeia. Dante鈥檚 conception of poetry as dictation provides a key historical and theoretical lens through which to rethink authorship, agency and creative intelligence.
Our Impact
The Dante and the Ouija Board project builds on a sustained programme of research, collaboration and dissemination developed across the past three years. In 2023, its central questions were presented in a keynote lecture at the University of Oxford, in the context of the Society for Italian Studies' conference 'Scientific and Technological Imaginaries in Italian Literature and Culture鈥�. In May 2024, a IAS Award at Warwick enabled the workshop 'Dante and the Ouija Board: Towards a Humanities-oriented Approach to AI Studies', bringing together scholars working across literature, technology and occult cultures. The project subsequently informed a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, School of Advanced Study, University of London (2024鈥�25), and has opened discussions with the University of Edinburgh for future collaborations on the notion of 鈥榠ntelligence鈥� in Italian literature and culture. The research has also generated a substantial body of publications and scholarly events. Professor Camilletti co-edited the special issue 'Speaking with the Dead' of The Italianist, and co-organised the 2024 events 'Speaking with the Dead: Italy and the Legacy of the Past in the Revolving Century (1750鈥�1850)' and 'The Haunting Canon: Dante, the Renaissance, and Other Revenants', followed by a podcast event with the Ottocentismi network. His critical edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti鈥檚 translation of Dante's Vita Nova appeared with the Societ脿 Dantesca Italiana in 2025, alongside an article on Rossetti, Dante, and Spiritualism, and a chapter in the edited volume 'Modern Spiritualism in Italian Literature and Culture (1765鈥�1969)' (Routledge, 2026). His 2024 lecture to the Societ脿 Dantesca Italiana, 'Dantismo e spettralit脿 in Dante Gabriel Rossetti', has also been disseminated through YouTube and a subsequent volume. The project is now feeding into the monograph 'A Ghastly Business: Authorship, Vampirism, and the Polidori-Rossetti Family Romance', to be completed in autumn 2026.
