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.

Contributors. Maria Amir, Ruth Asiimwe, Bernadette Barton, Ethel Brooks, Shelina Brown, Ruth Charnock, Soma Chaudhuri, Carolyn Chernoff, Saira Chhibber, Simon Clay, Krystal Cleary, Adrianna L. Ernstberger, Tina Escaja, Laurie Essig, Marcelitte Failla, D Ferrett, Marion Goldman, Jaime Hartless, Margaretha Haughwout, Patricia Humura, Apoorvaa Joshi, Govind Kelkar, Oliver Kellhammer, AyÇa Kurtoğlu, Helen Macdonald, Isabel Machado, Brandy Renee McCann, Dev Nathan, Mary Jo Neitz, Amy Nichols-Belo, Allison (or AP) Pierce, Emma Quilty, Anna Rogel, Karen Schaller, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Shashank Shekhar Sinha, Gabriella V. Smith, Nathan Snaza, Shannon Hughes Spence, Eric Steinhart, Morena Tartari, Nicole Trigg, Katie Von Wald, Tushabe wa Tushabe, Jane Ward
 

“In this impressive compendium, materialists and spiritualists, cyborgs and goddesses alike will find much to chew on. Witches of all genders, unite!” - Sophie Lewis author of (Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation) “The Witch Studies Reader is a must-have for scholars and practitioners of witchcraft, esotericism, and the metaphysical. The contributors go beyond the tropes of witches as rebels and recluses to examine the distinctive ways of knowing and being that manifest in their practices. Comprehensive in its scope and unapologetic in its feminist orientation, this volume is nothing less than an academic grimoire, conjuring vital new horizons for the transformative historical and ethnographic study of witchy things.” - Elizabeth Pérez, author of (Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions) "I’m thrilled to see witch studies getting its due, and I can’t wait to read this long-overdue anthology of contributions by transnational witch-scholars sharing their feminism, diversity, wisdom, anti-colonialism and interdisciplinarity." - Karla J. Strand (Ms. Magazine)

Soma Chaudhuri is Associate Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University.

Jane Ward is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.