Recasting the Bygone Witch: Representations of Lesser-Known Witches in Popular Culture

What can we learn by examining lesser-known witches or unconventional representations of the witch? 'Recasting the Bygone Witch: Representations of Lesser-Known Witches in Popular Culture' is an interdisciplinary collection that explores lesser-known witches across time, culture, and scholarly space, bringing together voices and perspectives from literature, game studies, political science, history, and more to examine overlooked or misrepresented figures of the witch. Timely and profoundly relevant, the collection asks readers to participate in inclusive conversations about the bygone witch as a historical, cultural, and political figure while examining who gets remembered or labeled as a witch, and why.
This collection features scholarship from an interdisciplinary, international cohort of scholars who analyze representations of bygone witches in discussions of power, identity, resistance, and reclamation using various methods of analysis and contextualization. From biographical examinations of Pamela Colman Smith, Marjorie Cameron, Sybil Leek, and Urška Klakočar Zupančič, to art and literary witchcraft analyses of 'The Fires of Bride', author Thomas Middleton, and artist William Hogarth, the collection places the bygone witch in conversation across disciplinary space. The collection also examines the rise of #WitchTok, witches in popular music, video games, and film, and discussions of reimagining female voices in college classrooms by way of literature’s Sycorax.
With a blend of rigorous research and accessible examples of bygone witches across socio-cultural spaces, 'Recasting the Bygone Witch: Representations of Lesser-Known Witches in Popular Culture' is an act of reimagining and preservation.

Aíne Murphy Norris is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Old Dominion University. She holds a B.A. (2004) and M.A. (2016) in English and research from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research interests include circus and sideshow history, oddities in popular culture, and the archival examination of lore, superstition, and the occult using mixed-method technologies. Her research uncovering untold information about turn-of-the-century circus aerialist, Eva Clark, was featured in the 'Cincinnati Enquirer', 'The News Virginian', and as a special feature on WHSV TV-3 in Virginia. Her work can be read in 'Horror Homeroom', 'Margaret Atwood Studies Journal, The Journal of American Culture and Bandwagon: The Journal of the Circus Historical Society'. Norris was awarded a Circus & Allied Arts Collection Fellowship at Illinois State University in 2022 for her dissertation on circus language and is the 2025 William M. Jones Award winner from the Popular Culture Association for her work unmasking a nineteenth-century Appalachian witchcraft accuser. Read more at ainenorris.info
Mariaelena DiBenigno received her PhD from the American Studies Program at the College of William & Mary in August 2020. After several years as a public school teacher, Mariaelena completed her MA in English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where her graduate thesis focused on folklore, geography, and tourism in the coastal Carolinas. At William & Mary, Mariaelena’s dissertation studied the relationship between popular culture, public history, and the haunting power of place in the Tidewater region of Virginia. She has worked with several regional history organizations, including the Mariners’ Museum Library and Menokin Foundation. Mariaelena has also instructed courses for William & Mary’s American Studies Program and the National Institute of American History and Democracy. Most recently, Mariaelena was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at James Monroe’s Highland, where she designed, fabricated, and installed exhibits; instructed courses for William & Mary; and facilitated community engagement. She has shared her research at annual meetings for the Northeast Modern Languages Association, American Studies Association, National Council on Public History, National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Virginia Consortium of Early Americanists.

Cross-disciplinary humanities, digital humanities, literary criticism, coven, sisterhood, professional magic, goddess, American Studies