Witchcraft and Emotions: Media and Cultural Meanings
Graduate House, 220 Leicester Street, Carlton, The University of Melbourne
25-27 November, 2015
Registration now open: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/witchcraft-and-emotions/
Download the draft programme HERE.
Witchcraft is an intensely emotional crime. The crime of witchcraft fundamentally concerns the impact of emotional states on physical ones. Anger, envy or hate of one person towards another could manifest itself in a variety of physical ailments and even death. In early modern Europe, women’s passions and lusts were sometimes said to make them more prone to witchcraft than their male counterparts. It was not just the witch who was intensely emotional: the Devil could also play the role of jealous lover or violent master. So too the families, relations, friends, and sometimes the community as a whole, would be drawn into the complex web of emotional claim and counter claim from which developed accusations and condemnations of witchcraft.
Yet despite the path-breaking work of Lyndal Roper and Diane Purkiss on the emotional self-representation and imagination of accused witches and their accusers, an emotional history of witchcraft remains relatively unexplored. This conference seeks to bring together scholars from a number of different fields, including history, art history and anthropology, to probe further into the relationship between witchcraft and emotions through an inter-disciplinary perspective.
Confirmed speakers include: Victoria Burbank (Anthropology, University of Western Australia), Johannes Dillinger (History, Oxford Brookes), Iris Gareis (Anthropology, Goethe University Frankfurt), Malcolm Gaskill (History, University of East Anglia), Eliza Kent (University of New England), Isak Niehaus (Anthropology, Brunel University), Abaigéal Warfield, (History, University of Adelaide), Jan Machielsen (History, University of Oxford), Patricia Simons (Art History, University of Michigan), Julian Goodare (History, University of Edinburgh), Sarah Ferber (Anthropology, La Trobe University), Deborah Van Heekeren (Anthropology, Macquarie University), Charlotte-Rose Millar (History, University of Melbourne), Laura Kounine (History, Max Planck Institute Berlin), Jacqueline van Gent (History, University of Western Australia), Charles Zika (History, University of Melbourne) and Sarah Ferber (History, University of Wollongong).
The symposium will run from Wednesday 25th – Friday 27th November and will be held at Graduate House, 220 Leicester Street, Carlton. The conference dinner at Il Vicolo Carlton will be at 7pm on Wednesday the 25th and there will be a free, public film screening of the 1922 film ‘Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages’ at 7.30pm on Thursday the 26th in the Singapore Theatre (B120), The School of Melbourne Design, the University of Melbourne.
This symposium is the first of two, the second of which will be held in Berlin in June 2016.
