Podcast: New Books Network
Listed as one of the most anticipated feminist books by MS Magazine
Featured Title in the Spring & Summer 2025 catalogue, Duke University Press
Reviewed in: Gender & Society; The Irish Times; Journal of American Academy of Religion
“Powerful, provocative, and paradigm-shifting, The Witch Studies Reader is a remarkable work of interdisciplinary scholarship.” Kristen J. Sollee in Gender & Society
Editors: Soma Chaudhuri & Jane Ward
Stories about witches 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 in our cultural imaginations. In academia, studies of witches rarely emerge from scholars who are themselves witches and/or embedded in communities of witchcraft practitioners. The Witch Studies Reader brings together a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners who examine witchcraft from a critical decolonial feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from exoticizing and pathologizing writing on witchcraft in the global South. The authors show how witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, builders of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right. Throughout, they account for the vastly different national, political-economic, and cultural contexts in which “the witch” is currently being claimed and repudiated. Offering a pathbreaking transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft that upends white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes, this volume brings into being the interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies.
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Soma Chaudhuri 