CFP: The Witch in American Women’s Writing after 1865

Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference

Philadelphia, November 6-9, 2025

Conference website

This proposed panel for the 2025 SSAWW conference focuses on women writers’ representation of the witch, a cultural figure imagined to exist on the outskirts of mainstream society while possessing the power to shape that society. Often the witch is a figure through whom fears and fantasies about race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and religion take significant form. To offer just one contemporary example, Vice President Kamala Harris was figured as a witch (cat familiar and all), by numerous far-right conservative commentators during her 2024 presidential run against President Donald Trump. The witch may be invoked to reinforce misogynistic and racist ideas just as the witch may be invoked as a feminist figure. 

Responding to the conference’s overall theme “Understanding Histories, Imagining Futures,” proposals for this panel should examine some aspect of how women writers since the US Civil War have taken up the witch (or specific “witches”) as a figure of the past worth theorizing in the present. Proposals may be based in any period of US literary production after 1865. Possible topics include but are not limited to 

• the witch and civic (un)belonging
• queer witches
• white, Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race witches
• representations of Salem’s 1692/93 witch trials or other early witch hunts
• the witch in feminist discourse (such as Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church and State (1893))
• the witch in relation to ethnic, national, regional, and/or racialized histories
• the witch as economic agent
• witches and environmental issues
• social justice and the witch

 Please send abstracts (250 words), including the proposed paper title and a brief biographical sketch (100 words) to Samaine Lockwood (jlockwo3@gmu.edu) by February 22, 2025.