THE WITCH STUDIES READER 
A spellbinding collection of academic and popular writing about witches and witchcraft across the globe, from over thirty scholars and practitioners of witchcraft. 
Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward, editors
​Coming in SPRING 2025 with Duke University Press

Stories about witches, found in nearly every corner of the world, are by their nature stories about the most basic and profound of human experiences—healing, sex, violence, tragedies, aging, death, and encountering the mystery and magic of the unknown. It is no surprise, then, that witches loom large across the span of our cultural imaginations. Almost everyone is intrigued by the power of witches, their simultaneous allure and danger now well documented in centuries of folklore and popularized on TV, in film, fiction, and social media. In academia, there are anthropological sub-disciplines devoted to the study of witches, and yet they all too often view their subject through the well-worn gaze of the colonizer or outsider, rather than emerging from scholars who are themselves witches and/or embedded in communities of witchcraft practitioners. This reader stems from our longing not just to place witches’ voices alongside feminist academic examinations of witchcraft, but to make clear that scholars and witches are sometimes the same people. From a decolonial feminist perspective, this overlap makes sense, as witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, manifesters of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right. Just as importantly, we envisioned a reader that would trace points of departure and convergences as we followed the witch across the globe, looking for new understandings that upend the white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes that informed many previous writings. And, thus, the global witch studies reader was launched as an effort to call into existence a new interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies. THE WITCH STUDIES READER offers a pathbreaking and field-defining transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft. It is the first book of its kind to take account of the vastly different national, political-economic, and cultural contexts in which “the witch” is currently being claimed and repudiated and the first collection to examine witchcraft from a critical feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from anthropological and exoticizing or pathologizing writing on witchcraft in the global south. 
​

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction to the Reader: Manifesting Witch Studies
Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward

SECTION 1: The Colonial Encounter

Witchcraft in My Community: Healing Sex and Sexuality 
Tushabe wa Tushabe, Patricia Humura; Ruth Asiimwe

“What is a Witch?”: Tituba’s Subjunctive Challenge
Nathan Snaza

Irish Feminist Witches - Using Witchcraft and Activism to Heal from Violence and Trauma 
Shannon Hughes Spence

 Whose Craft?: Contentions on Open and Closed Practice in Contemporary Witchcraft(s)
Apoorva Joshi and Ethel Brooks

SECTION 2: Lineages of Healing

You Deserve, Baby! Spiritual Co-Creation, Black Witches and Feminism
Marcelitte Failla

Resurrecting Granny: A Brief Excavation of Appalachian Folk Magic
Brandy Renee McCann

“Some Decks May Be Stacked Against Us But This Deck Is Ours”: Justice-Centered Tarot in and Against the New Age
Krystal Cleary

Ecstatic Desires: Queerness and the Witch’s Body
Simon Clay and Emma Quilty

Dietsch Magic Past and Future
Eric Steinhart

“We Are Here With our Rebellious Joy”: Witches and Witchcraft in Turkey
Ayça Kurtoğlu 

Fortune-telling, women's friendship, and divination commodification in contemporary Italy
Morena Tartari 

SECTION 3: Killing the Witch

A Feminist Theory of Witch Hunts
Govind Kelkar and Dev Nathan 

Occult Violence and the Savage Slot: Understanding Tanzanian Witch-killings in Historical and Ethnographic Context
Amy Nichols-Belo 

Going All the Way: From Village to Supreme Court for a Witch-Killing in Central India
Helen Macdonald

Contemporary Trends in Witch Hunting in India
Shashank Shekhar Sinha 

Bewitching Gender History
Adrianna Ernstberger

SECTION 4: Art, Aesthetics and Cultural Production

Mista Boo: Portrait of a Drag Witch
Isabel Machado

Witching Sound in the Anthropocene (and Occultcene)
D Ferrett

Witch’s Guide to the Underground: Sixties Counterculture, Dianic Wicca and the Cultural Trope of the “Witchy Diva”
Shelina Brown

A Queer Critical Analysis of Contemporary Representations of Churail in Hindi Film
Saira Chhibber

Pakistan’s Churails: Young Feminists Choosing ‘Witch’ Way is Forward 
 Maria Amir

From ‘Born This Witch’ to ‘Bad Bitch Witch’: A History of Witch Representation in Western Pop Culture 
Jaime Hartless and Gabriella Smith

“I Put a Spell On You and Now You’re Mine” – A Vulvacentric Reading of Witchcraft
Anna Rogel

SECTION 5: Protest and Reclaiming

Hexing The Patriarchy: The Revolutionary Aesthetics of W.I.T.C.H.
 Carolyn Chernoff

Witch Ins, Trumpkin Smashing, and Other Feminist Acts
 Tina Escaja and Laurie Essig

Disappearing Acts: Attending ‘Witch School’ in Brooklyn, NY
Jacquelyn Marie Shannon  

We Are All Witches: My Pagan Journey
Bernadette Barton

SECTION 6: Witch Epistemologies

Witching the Institution:  Academia and Feminist Witchcraft 
Ruth Charnock and Karen Schaller 

A Ruderal Witchcraft Manifesto
Margaretha Haughwout and Oliver Kellhammer 

Feminism as a Demon, or, The Difference Witches Make:
Chiara Fumai with Carla Lonzi
 Nicole Trigg

Religion and Magic Through Feminist Lenses
Mary Jo Neitz and Marion S Goldman

Crafting Against Capitalism: Queer Longings for Witch Futures
AP Pierce and Katie Von Wald

WITCH HUNTS EVERYWHERE 
A special issue of Journal of Gender Studies

Journal of Gender Studies: Special issue on contemporary feminist reinterpretation of witch hunts 
Special issue co-editors Jane Ward ([email protected]) and Soma Chaudhuri ([email protected])
 
                  COMING SOON!

WITCH HUNTS EVERYWHERE:
A Feminist Re-Mapping of Misogyny
and Contemporary Anti-Witch Violence 

Description:
What is a “witch hunt” in the 21st Century? On the one hand, enormously powerful and corrupt men like Donald Trump toss the phrase around with ease, describing themselves as victims of witch hunts--is Trump calling himself a witch?--while reproducing the very systems that have incited actual witch hunts around the globe. On the other hand, most people in the global North associate witch hunts solely with the horrors of the early modern Europe and colonial America, unaware that witch hunts continue to be a contemporary form of violence.

In recent years, the topic of ongoing witch hunts or incidents of violence against witches has received occasional attention in the media, with journalists often expressing horror about these extreme and irrational acts of violence (ex: India Struggles to Eradicate an Old Scourge: Witch Hunting – The New York Times (nytimes.com). Reports like these ultimately relegate the larger causes behind witch hunts to lingering superstitious practices among indigenous or traditional communities, where oppression of women drives the brutality of hunts. While the fear of witches may have some origins in superstitions and myths, persecution of witches and witch hunts are an outcome of the intersection between misogyny and complex structural problems linked by disadvantage and discrimination: poverty, displacement, war, land privatization, lack of adequate healthcare and sanitation, and climate disasters occurring within patriarchal societies.   Recent research and global reports have pointed out that persecution of witches is more prevalent than assumed and can take place in both rural and urban regions, where such violence is justified as a way of controlling suspicious and unruly women and maintaining their subordinate status vis-a-vis men. 
But today the violent persecution of witches is not only directed at women who are scapegoated for a community’s problems, but it is also directed against “new witches,” to quote Silvia Federici, like Brazilian human rights activist Marielle Franco and the Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres, who were murdered for organizing against injustice  (see Witch Hunts Are Back — And This Time They're Targeting Female Activists | HuffPost Women). As in the Middle Ages, the witch hunts of today are used to silence women who threaten the existing social order, where women’s subordinate status is deemed necessary to nationalist and fascist political movements.  
The witch hunt is also found in online trolling and public shame campaigns.  While we live in a time in which everyone, regardless of gender, is increasingly vulnerable to public shaming and cancellation, doxxing and violent threats against public feminists take heightened and misogynistic forms in which women’s bodies, rationality, authority, virtue, and very right to exist become questions for mass public debate. As media-fueled, symbolic witch hunts—from the “trials” of Anita Hill to Christine Ford— have shown us, contemporary witch hunts take not only individual women as their targets but also the feminist movement that these women are believed to represent. 
In the global South, hijras and kotis, along with LGBTQ+ groups around the world, continue to face systemic violence—yet another form of witch hunt designed to send a public warning to people who dare to challenge gender norms and hierarchies. Whether historical or contemporary, in rural or urban communities, in religious or in secular contexts, witches (real, perceived, reclaimed, or labelled) are portrayed as malicious and deranged, traits that legitimize their persecution. Feminist and queer efforts to reclaim the witch as a healer, leader, safekeeper of traditional knowledge, magic practitioner, and revenge-seeker are always vulnerable to negation by those in power who will recast the witch’s work as a threat to all that is good and innocent.
How is it possible that horrific violence against witches in all their forms continues to be justified, and how can we collectively resist such violence and imagine a world in which such justifications no longer hold sway?