Season 3, Episode 5
Teen Witch
How the media portrays teenage witches
December 10th, 2024
Sabrina, Willow, Thomasin, Queenie – many of us have a favorite teen witch from film or television. The teenage witch archetype has changed over the decades, from a silly materialist bobby soxer, to a raging force of rebellious autonomy. But until very recently, the teen witch has almost always been presented as middle-class, female, and white. And while media depictions of witches have inspired Seekers of the magical and sorcerous – the world of actual teen witches is still very much shrouded in mystery.
Featuring Miranda Corcoran, Addy Ebrahimy, Heather Greene, and Susan Ridgely.
FEATURING
Lecturer in the English Department in University College, Cork Ireland
Miranda Corcoran is a lecturer in twenty-first-century literature at University College Cork. Her research interests include genre fiction, popular fiction, comics/graphic novels, sci-fi, horror, the gothic, witchcraft and Satanism in pop culture. Her first monograph, Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches, was published in 2022 by the University of Wales Press. Her second monograph, The Craft, was published in 2023 by Auteur/Liverpool University Press. She is a regular contributor to the popular online magazine Diabolique.
Addy Ebrahimy
Practitioner
Addy is a witch and is a founding member of her college's first pagan and witches student organization at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
Journalist and film studies scholar
Heather is a journalist, editor, and award-winning author based in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has mostly been focused on the areas of religion, the occult, pop culture, film, and witchcraft.
Religious Studies Program Director and Graduate Advisor
Susan is the Director of the religious studies program at the university of Wisconsin, She uses the methodologies of lived religion to analyze the role of age and intergenerational engagement in religious practice. She is the author of Practicing What the Doctor Preached: At Home with Focus on the Family (Oxford University Press, 2016), When I was a Child: Children’s Interpretations of First Communion (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), and two edited volumes on theories and methods for including children in the academic study of religion. Her current project uses archival research and oral histories to explore the generational consequences of the desegregation of the diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina in 1953.
CREDITS
Host: Heather Freeman; Producer: Amber Walker; Editor: Lucy Perkins; Associate Producer: Noor Gill; Sound Design: Jennie Cataldo; Fact Checker: Dania Suleman; Executive Producer for PRX Productions: Jocelyn Gonzales; Music: APM Music and Epidemic Sound; Project Managers: Edwin Ochoa; Advisors: Helen Berger, Danielle Boaz, Yvonne Chireau, Chas Clifton, Abel Gomez, Daniel Harms, Corey Hutcheson, Sean McLeod, Sabina Magliocco, Thorn Mooney, and Meg Whalen; Guests: Christopher Blythe, “Eva”, Elizabeth Fenton, and Benjamin Park; Additional Thanks: Dr. William Davis; Funding and Support: The National Endowment for the Humanities and The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
TRANSCRIPT - Coming Soon
LEARN MORE
Alexander, C. S. (2024). Black Witches and Queer Ghosts: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation in Teen Supernatural Serials. Lexington Books.
Corcoran, M. (2022). Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches. University of Wales Press.
Greene, H. (2021). Lights, Camera, Witchcraft: A Critical History of Witches in American Film and Television. Llewellyn Worldwide.
Strhan, A., Parker, S. G., & Ridgely, S. (Eds.). (2017). The Bloomsbury reader in religion and childhood. Bloomsbury Publishing.