“a standout”
“rigorous but never rigid”
“brilliant students who were all excited to learn from each other”
“dynamic and thought-provoking discussions”
“smart, generous, and unforgettable”
“higher-level learning at its finest and most fun”
These phrases are only a sampling of the comments from students reflecting on the English Honors seminar “The Witches of American Literature,” taught in Fall 2024 by Professor Samaine Lockwood. The course studied representations of the witch in American culture from the Civil War to the 21st century, particularly in the long shadow of the Salem Witch Trials.
“I think it is easy to see the relevance of witches across time,” Lockwood explained. “The witch is a powerful and enduring cultural figure in large part because women continue to struggle with multiple and intersecting forms of structural discrimination, and the culture at large continues to grapple with questions of what is permissible in terms of womanhood and women's freedom. The witch is consistently (though not exclusively) a figure of rebellion against one or more existing power structures. Often aligned with atypical female intelligence (well read, sharp-tongued), queerness (often unmarried or widowed), nature (familiar with herbs and animals, living in the "woods" or on the outskirt of town), the human body including things sexual (a midwife or nurse), the witch continues to fascinate us.”
Primary texts included Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, Celia Rees’ 2000 young adult novel Witch Child, and Kimberly Belflower’s 2022 play John Proctor is the Villain, currently running on Broadway. Another book— Maryse Condé’s 1986 novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (first published in English in 1992)—was part of a key focus on the enslaved woman, Tituba, who was one of the first accused in Salem and the subject of Lockwood’s own current work.
“This course came out of my research on the book I'm currently writing about how Tituba has been represented in US culture from 1820 to today,” she said. “Tituba, the ‘black witch of Salem,’ as Condé calls her, is an important figure through which to think about gender, race, and civic belonging as they coalesce in America and her presence in cultural representations of Salem witchcraft complicate the often white-dominant narrative about witches in the US and women of color in New England history.”
Circling back to praise for the course, Lockwood earned specific shout-outs for engagement and expertise: “Her mind fires on extra cylinders, and meeting her where she’s at was a challenge in the best way.” But challenge also equated to opportunities for students—especially for their final projects, which students designed themselves, building from their personal or professional interests or their specific disciplines within the English majors. Those final projects included:
- F.N. Baylor’s zine “Feed the Serpent December 1695,” modeled after the feminist zines of the 1980s and ’90s, with original poetry, a witch manifesto, drawings, repurposing of representations of witches from across time.
- Joey Conley’s “found” book, using a 19th-century work of feminist humor writing, Samantha Among the Brethren, to house a collection of poems, definitions, and musings about witches across American cultural history.
- Elliott Frey’s rhetorical analysis of popular cultural writings positioning Kamala Harris as a witch, linking that construction to conservative depictions of the witch in centuries preceding and up through the nineteenth century, as explored by first wave feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage in Woman, Church, and State (1893).
- Thomas Malinsky’s short story “Afflicted,” retelling the story of Abigail Williams from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
- Erin Zellner’s essay “The Power in One's Own Physical Form: Sexuality and the Material Body in Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.”
“I’m drawn to how history mistranslates women, and the voices in our readings spoke directly to that curiosity,” said Conley about the motivations behind Samantha Among the Brethren. “As a poet, my instinct is to always respond creatively, and my intent was to build a journal that felt like a found text—a sacred object of sorts—part collage, part poetry, part protest. It’s full of blackout poems, dried herbs, ripped-up texts—pieces I stitched together from our readings and from my own questions about what gets remembered and what doesn’t. It felt more like conjuring than writing, honestly . . . I wasn’t just studying these voices—I was trying to speak with and through them. There’s something both haunting and healing about that.”
"Feed the Serpent December 1695"
Baylor echoed similar sentiments about “Feed the Serpent December 1695,” building on having been a longtime fan of zines as a form: “The idea for this project actually sparked after visiting a zine event in Bethesda called Small Press Expo. Seeing all the creative designs for zines made me want to try making one myself. I was also aware of their influence and importance to queer and BIPOC communities as an alternative, underground avenue of information and community in the 80s-90s through previous research I’d done on the time period . . . Instead of simply analyzing things like the Salem Witch Trial court records or Cotton Mather’s book, I got to dig my hands into the text and play around with it, engaging in a very hands-on way.”
And Malinsky’s short story “Afflicted” provided an opportunity to interact not only with a text but with a previous experience of it: “When I first read The Crucible, I was in my junior year of high school and still presenting female,” Malinsky explained, “so I was drawn to the character of Abigail Williams as a 17-year-old girl having an ‘affair’ with a married man and the fact that she's portrayed as a seductress despite quite clearly being a victim . . . I really appreciated getting to express my thoughts on this topic through creative writing since that's my concentration and helped me connect with the work in a way that a traditional essay wouldn't have.
Creative projects like these, Lockwood said, “can enhance our understanding of existing literature and literary forms because they are necessarily ‘talking back’ to a text, as in Thomas's short story, or repurposing a form, as F.N.’s zine that imagines past witches using the late 20th century queer feminist form of the zine, and so are re-engaging critical cultural problems and questions, demanding that readers recognize the continuation of the past in our present.”
Frey’s rhetorical analysis and Zellner’s essay may take the form of those more traditional essays, but each distinguished itself by drawing on student’s individual interests and concerns.
“While I have written about sexuality in other courses, I tended to focus on topics of identity expression, whereas my focus on the physical body was more prominent in this project,” said Zellner. “In this text, Tituba uses her sexuality and body freely, happily, and with no shame, to reclaim her agency, as her position did not afford her much at all. This also reflected a lot of the ideas of witches we had learned throughout the course, that many women were demonized and accused of witchcraft based on their use of their own sexuality as well as general sense of confidence and agency.” The specifics of the assignment allowed her to explore “topics of gender and sexuality that I find interesting to research and write about” while also being able to “fully insert myself into conversation with other scholars.”
Frey was driven by a similar brand of personal interest: “I am interested in political rhetoric, specifically extremist rhetoric in new media. I noticed a few examples of prominent right-wing figures in new media using rhetoric that describes women in politics as sinister actors. When we read Matilda Joslyn Gage's Women, Church and State, I found that she described the same phenomenon happening repeatedly, century after century. With this class occurring right in the heat of Kamala Harris's presidential campaign, I found extensive examples of religious fundamentalist podcasts calling Kamala Harris a literal witch. I found this fascinating and wanted to really dig into the connections between descriptions of women in politics as witches in contemporary society and throughout history.”
While pursuing personal goals or interests, student projects also had to be rooted in or inspired by one of the texts from the syllabus, and students followed a series of steps: proposing the topic, meeting individually with Lockwood to determine its scope, and then working with Lockwood to determine criteria for evaluation. Whatever the project, all students had to integrate a set number of scholarly sources, both from the discipline of literature and the discipline of history, among other research.
“Students were responsible for figuring out how to integrate that research into the final product effectively,” Lockwood said. “Those who wrote creative projects produced an analytical ‘gloss’ and some, like Joey Conley, chose to integrate the citations into the final art object itself. I believe in giving students clear and concrete criteria and then letting them decide how to execute it.”
That leeway for students to forge their own paths, guided and supported by one-on-one conversations with the professor, is ultimately one of the great benefits of the Honors Seminar—a step up to higher levels of engagement and learning.
“I think I was able to get a much deeper view of the texts then I would have otherwise,” Baylor said, “and actually put myself into the headspace and embody these witches from centuries ago.”
The topic for the English Honors Seminar changes with each semester and each professor. In Spring 2025, Amal Amireh led a section on “Literature and Human Rights.” This fall, Jennifer Linhart Wood is teaching “Renaissance Intercultural Encounters.” And in Spring 2026, Eric Anderson will explore “Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond.”
For more information the English Honors Program, visit https://english.gmu.edu/undergraduate/honors/english.
If you would like to receive a “SALEM WITCH TRIALS READING LIST,” email Samaine Lockwood at jlockwo3@gmu.edu with those words in all caps in the subject line.
September 30, 2025