The New Witch Studies:

The Journal of Gender Studies editor, Feona Attwood chairs a roundtable discussion of the book with Soma Chaudhuri, Emma Quilty and Jane Ward about their books The Witch Studies Reader (Chaudhuri & Ward, Citation2025) and Witch Power: Hexing the Patriarchy with Feminist Magic (Quilty, Citation2025) and about the emergence and significance of a contemporary feminist ‘Witch Studies’.

“We have been writing about witches, witchcraft, witch hunts for quite a bit of time now. And we’ve been also writing about the various manifestations of witchcraft, how real – not metaphorical – witch hunts are taking place today, and what does self-identifying as a witch or being labelled as a witch mean. And there are different names in various languages to describe and name the witch. And so, yes, there has been a lot of published work on witches, witchcraft and witch hunts among interested scholars, and when you look at the disciplinary range of scholarship on the topic, there is a vast volume of literature. Criminologists and anthropologists have written quite a lot on witchcraft and witch hunts with a focus on both Western and non-Western contexts and we have had feminist scholarship on witches, witchcraft and witch hunts for decades now. But when we think about the emerging witch studies, it is the coming together of the various manifestations and perspectives on the understanding of witches, witchcraft and witch hunts. What does it take to be a witch? And what does witchcraft in practice look like today? Now, it could be a healing. It could also be a form of resistance. It could also be something very violent. And that violence itself could also lead to various manifestation of the witch. And so, your question was how is this emerging witch studies different from what has existed. To me the emerging witch studies is the interdisciplinary queer feminist reframing of the various manifestation of the witch with a strong focus on healing, reclaiming, and resisting.” – Soma Chaudhuri