Dr Will Pooley
MST(Oxon.), MA, DPhil(Oxon.), BA(Oxon.)
Current positions
Senior Lecturer in Modern History
Department of History (Historical Studies)
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
I am a social and cultural historian of popular culture and folklore in France since 1789. My interests include witchcraft, magic, and the Occult, including their connections to the history of science and medicine, as well as gender and family history, rural history, crime history, and anthropology. I also have a special interest in the field of 'creative histories:' histories that are made in collaborative and imaginative ways, and told in formats other than straightforward non-fiction prose, such as theatre, games, poetry, and fiction.I blog regularly on my research here.
I have held fellowships at the Institute of Historical Research and Utah State University, and taught at the University of Oxford and Utah State University.
I am currently researching witchcraft in France 1791-1940.
Although witchcraft was effectively decriminalized in 1682, conflicts over sorcery not only continued into the eighteenth century, but beyond the Revolution of 1789, and across the whole nineteenth century. French newspapers reported hundreds of criminal trials involving witchcraft in this period. Many were trials of ‘witches’ for fraud, or illegal medical practices, but there were also at least 70 murder trials where the motive was suspicion of witchcraft. Where does this ‘modern’ witchcraft fit into the accepted narratives of the long nineteenth century? My project is particularly concerned with the connections between new medical, legal, psychological, scientific, and para-scientific ideas and the witches. Far from stamping out ‘superstition’, the spread of literacy and new ideas gave witchcraft wider resonances, intensifying and legitimating modern social conflicts.
My first book, Body and Tradition in Nineteenth-Century France: Félix Arnaudin and the Moorlands of Gascony, 1870-1914 asks what the rural population thought important in their own lives during this period of dramatic change, in a region that arguably saw more rapid transformation than any other in France, the moorlands of Gascony. To answer this question, it focuses on Félix Arnaudin's folklore collection. Using songs, dialect speech and tales, the book argues that the labouring population understood the changes during the period of modernization in terms of their own bodies.
I am also the co-author of Creative Histories of Witchcraft: France, 1790-1940, a hands-on guide to creative practice as historical research which uses witchcraft as a case study.
Contact
Office: 2.4, 26-7 St Michael’s Park
Email:william.pooley@bristol.ac.uk
Twitter: @willpooley
Consultation hours: https://calendly.com/wp15991
Research Supervision
I welcome enquiries about postgraduate work on any topic in nineteenth-century French history, and would be especially interested to hear from students who want to work on criminal justice, modern witchcraft, folklore, or the Occult.
I am also interested in supervising students who want to combine creative practice of any kind with historical research.
I am currently the Programme Director for the MA History.
Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you would like to discuss your research plans.
Teaching
I teach undergraduate courses on topics including the modern history of witchcraft (after the 18th century), the Napoleonic Wars, the French Revolution, public history, and creative historical collaborations and projects.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Exploring Bristol-Toulouse Research Synergies in the Arts
Principal Investigator
Role
Co-Investigator
Description
Two themes were identified for further development: small nations (identity, language and politics) and African Studies. We will also explore further exchanges between academics at both institutions at all stages…Managing organisational unit
Department of FrenchDates
20/05/2024 to 31/07/2028
Creative Histories of Witchcraft
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of History (Historical Studies)Dates
01/01/2019 to 30/04/2021
Creative histories
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of History (Historical Studies)Dates
15/03/2017 to 28/02/2018
Thesis supervisions
Witchcraft and the Fourth Estate in Victorian Britain
Supervisors
The Last Sentinels of Gallicanism
Supervisors
Borderlands and borderspaces
Supervisors
Publications
Selected publications
17/02/2023Doubt and the Dislocation of Magic: France, 1790-1940
Past and Present
Paper Tools for Broken Hearts
French History
Creative Histories of Witchcraft
Creative Histories of Witchcraft
Recent publications
25/07/2024Natalie Zemon Davis and the Politics of the Historical Imagination
Social History Book Club
Social History
Twilight of the godlings: the shadowy beginnings of Britain’s supernatural beings: by Francis Young, Colour illustrations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 365+xviii pp., £30 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-009-33036-7.
Folk Life: Journal of Ethnological Studies
All Cops Are Biased: Historiography as Detective Story
Historical Research, Creative Writing, and the Past
Authorities and Control
Bloomsbury Cultural History of Magic: The Age of Empire, c.1800-1920