ROLL CALL

The New Witches: Critical Essays on 21st Century Television Portrayals, 2021

After Charmed ended in 2006, witches were relegated to sidekicks of televisual vampires or children's programs. But during the mid-2010s they began to resurface as leading characters in shows like the immensely popular The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the Charmed reboot, Salem, American Horror Story: Coven, and the British program, A Discovery of Witches. No longer sweet, feminine, domestic, and white, these witches are powerful, diverse, and transgressive, representing an intersectional third-wave feminist vision of the witch. Featuring original essays from noted scholars, this is the first critical collection to examine witches on television from the late 2010s. Situated in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, essays examine the reemergence and shifting identities of TV witches through the perspectives of intersectional gender studies, hauntology, politics, morality, monstrosity, violence, queerness, disabilities, rape, ecofeminism, linguistics, family, and digital humanities.

Art and Documentation / Sztuka i Dokumentacja, 2022

The exhibition "Lost Element / Re-construction of the Witch" at the VBKOE was the next chapter of a collective artistic investigation of TFR Archive on the life and damaged or lost artworks by Teresa Feodorowna Ries (1866-1956), an Austrian artist of Jewish origin. The main topic of the exhibition was her damaged sculpture "The Witch" (1895), representing a vigorous young woman while preparing for the Witches’ Sabbath and cutting her toenails with big shears. Ries's sculpture was an extraordinary example of an artwork challenging the old patriarchal order and symbolizing feminine power. The figure seems full of vigour and eroticism and simultaneously a rebel who challenges the clichés of representations of women in art and goes beyond stereotypes. It was vandalized several times and the hand with scissors was also lost. The exhibition Lost Element/ Re-construction of the Witch asked the question of how we can work with loss, which here is represented by the lost hand of “The Witch.” “The Witch” deprived of the hand with shears refers to the woman deprived of her agency. The sculpture also represents the fate of the artist herself, who was persecuted by the Nazis because of her Jewish origin and had to flee to Switzerland, leaving all her life and artworks behind. The exhibition in the Association of Austrian Women Artists gallery was also an excellent opportunity to reinterpret and give a new spirit to the works of Teresa F. Ries as an artist of multi-ethnic roots, by contemporary women artists of different origins, who were connected through her story. It's also a tribute to the female artist, who was brave enough to live the life she wanted, even though she had to face constant prejudices towards her gender and origin. She was one of the women who paved the path for the next generations of women artists.

Preternature, 2020

DUJES: Dibrugarh University Journal of English Studies (UGC CARE 1) https://www.dujes.co.in/p/cry-witch-representation-of-german.html?m=1, 2021

Witch trials in Continental Europe had overrun societies at large throughout Western civilizational history. The speculation about the existence of what basically boiled down to harvesting the occult and invoking the paranormal- an idea that resuscitated itself every century since the Classical Antiquities with resurgent waves of public paranoia- ultimately culminated into intermittent incidents of genocide of the paradoxically “accused victims”. While maintaining an inextricable connection with sorcery- associated with men of learned scholarship- witchcraft was viewed as a predominantly women-centric practice of the supernatural, which came to be pejoratively presented in patriarchal, Christian sociocultural discourse as more malicious and actively detrimental than helpful or wise. The scarlet letter of witchcraft accusations were mostly geared towards a) Wise Women in the margins of society- women who exhibited knowledge and skill in medicine, herbal remedies and midwifery, b) women either stepping outside parameters of “acceptable” (sexual or otherwise) behaviour or going beyond sexual control by men due to age /infertility, and c) women connected with potential rivals in the game of political clout. The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Potzsch and The Witch’s Trinity by Erika Mailman transact with all three tiers of vicitimizable candidates, in the national as well as religious background of German anti-witch discourse, which had been predominated by Kramer and Sprnger’s Malleus Maleficarum, set in the time when fanaticism and Catholic fear-mongering had formed the bedrock of the German witch trials. Alongside inspecting the authenticity of representation of continental German (associated with the Holy Roman Empire) witch-lore and historicity of the trials, the paper shall investigate the inescapable link between Church-backed patriarchy’s delusional fear, jealousy and consequent scapegoating through physical/sexual violence towards the economically and socio-sexually marginalized.

World Journal of English Language

The archetype of witches has been an alluring instrument to inject ideologies through literary forms, the portrayal of which has taken a trajectory over the centuries- from negative to positive to neutral roles in its invention and reinvention through particularly, several popular drama series in the contemporary scenario, streamed over multiple over-the-top (OTT) platforms, wherein the representation of witches has become a sensational theme. This study intends to explore the divergence from Arthur Miller’s socio-political concerns in The Crucible (1953), to the contemporary creative adaptations of this subject matter in six popular American television/web series that have experimented with artistic freedom, through an analysis of the antagonistic, antifeminist, feminist perspectives as well as the saviour complex imposed on such fictional characters, through a new historicist angle, since such tales are a fusion of history and imagination. These narratives produce a counter ideolo...

This course focuses on three aspects of witches and the witch persecutions:  historical: the "Burning Times" in early modern Europe and witch-hunting in Colonial America;  literary: the depiction of the witch in fairy tales (the Grimm-tradition) and in 'serious' literature, particularly literature that purports to rely on historical sources (from Hans Sachs to Arthur Miller);  and scholarly: the explanations that scholars have sought for one of the most horrific instances of mass destruction in world history.