This roundtable brings together four scholars of early modern English history, literature, drama, and music, who research, write, and teach about the supernatural and witchcraft. We devise a new look at contemporary representations of “the witch as text” as viewed through an early modern lens.
Rachel Clark will analyze tangled attitudes toward disability, gender, and race in The Witcher, to examine how disability functions as a catalyst for magic, a supernatural excess of ability that also defies norms.
Colleen Kennedy sniffs out the scented and contested olfactive histories of early modern witches to tease out the layered accords and complicated phenomenology of contemporary niche and independent perfume houses.
Kendra Preston Leonard visits the metaphor and ethos of poetry covens, like Pussy Magic, Coven of Midnight, Luna Luna Magazine, and COVEN-19, who use the rhetoric of witchcraft and magic to create safe, inclusive spaces for writers and readers who are drawn to the supernatural and the idea of anti-racist, anti-patriarchal matrices of power.
Jennifer McNabb explores the boundaries between modern historian and historical texts/circumstances in both the novel and television series A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Together, these short papers ask: What happens when we trouble the boundaries between past and now when studying contemporary representations of witches? How is the body of the witch reinscribed as a(n) (a)historical text in contemporary media?
Please Note: this event will not be recorded.
This roundtable brings together four scholars of early modern English history, literature, drama, and music, who research, write, and teach about the supernatural and witchcraft. We devise a new look at contemporary representations of “the witch as text” as viewed through an early modern lens.
Rachel Clark will analyze tangled attitudes toward disability, gender, and race in The Witcher, to examine how disability functions as a catalyst for magic, a supernatural excess of ability that also defies norms.
Colleen Kennedy sniffs out the scented and contested olfactive histories of early modern witches to tease out the layered accords and complicated phenomenology of contemporary niche and independent perfume houses.
Kendra Preston Leonard visits the metaphor and ethos of poetry covens, like Pussy Magic, Coven of Midnight, Luna Luna Magazine, and COVEN-19, who use the rhetoric of witchcraft and magic to create safe, inclusive spaces for writers and readers who are drawn to the supernatural and the idea of anti-racist, anti-patriarchal matrices of power.
Jennifer McNabb explores the boundaries between modern historian and historical texts/circumstances in both the novel and television series A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Together, these short papers ask: What happens when we trouble the boundaries between past and now when studying contemporary representations of witches? How is the body of the witch reinscribed as a(n) (a)historical text in contemporary media?
Please Note: this event will not be recorded.