I am a fourth year PhD student from the north of England. My research considers witchcraft events as moments of collective and personal female spirituality, knowledge creation, and community in a confessional environment otherwise absent of such opportunities. As Michel de Certeau has shown, women during possession and confession experiences are in a dialogic, performative relationship with the community through which the community experiences a conception of the women's faith and ideology. As my supervisor, Nancy E. van Deusen has noted, women in faith communities experience religion through collective and sensorial means. In the (transcribed) accounts of possession and confession, terrestrial and theological imaginations are laid out in a language that might only be spoken during witchcraft events. And in the lifeways and landscapes formed during these events, physical and intellectual communities can be mapped onto the landscape. Using these experiential lenses: the performative body, the sensorial body, the language of visions and imagination, and lifeways and landscapes; I can look at the ways in which witchcraft events served as moments of collective and personal female spirituality, knowledge creation, and community building.
My work at Queen's University has included an annual RAship with Nancy E. van Deusen for her SSHRC-funded project on Indigenous slavery in North America. I have been a TA for HIST 223: Toxins in Global History, LLCU 249: Latin Lovers: Love, Sex and Popular Culture (ASO) and HIST 283: Women and Gender in North America (ASO). I was Co-Chair of the 20th Annual McGill-Queen's Graduate History Conference, held virtually April 28th-29th 2023. International Representative for the Graduate History Student Association 2022-2023. Before coming to Queen's University I worked at Brantwood, the former home of John Ruskin, as Collections Manager. I received my MA from Leiden University in 2017 with the thesis "‘Rebels, Conservatives, and the Salem Witchcraft Crisis: Exploiting the Fragile Communities of Colonial Massachusetts." I received the Theodore Roosevelt American History Award from the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies for this thesis.
Conference presentations
- Dalhousie University English Department Conference, Destinations and Departures, August 11th-13th 2022, virtual. "A Saga for the Lake Country: Fairies, Ghosts and the Production of Knowledge in W.G. Collingwood's Thorstein of the Mere."
- 71st Annual Midwest Conference for British Studies, September 27th-28th 2024. "The Performative Body in the Witchcraft Trial: Conjuring the "Enchanted Isle."
