ABOUT

The symposium is being organised by me, Dr Holly Morse.

 

I am Lecturer in Bible, Gender and Culture at the University of Manchester, and author of Encountering Eve's Afterlives: A New Reception Critical Approach to Genesis 2-4. In this book, I seek to destabilize the persistently pessimistic framing of Eve as a highly negative symbol of femininity within Western culture by engaging with marginal, and even heretical, interpretations that focus on more positive aspects of her character. In doing so, I explore how and why the image of Eve as a dangerous temptress has gained considerably more cultural currency than the equally viable pictures of her as a subversive wise woman or as a mourning mother. This book began its life as my PhD thesis at the University of Oxford, with the title 'And God Created Woman...'
 

I am now researching cultural feminisations of transgressive knowledge and magic in the West from antiquity to today (‘Serpentine Saviours and Woke Women: When the Satanic Witch Met Eve in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ in Zanne Domoney-Lyttle and Rebekah Welton (eds) Cultural Bibles in Popular Visual Entertainment (Scriptural Traces: London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark forthcoming 2022; ‘Falling for the Devil - Subversive Sisters, Eve and the Witch, in Modern Feminist Activism and the Malleus Maleficarum’: under submission). In doing so I reflect on how texts produced through the ages have sought to define heresy and magic as feminine - especially through rhetorical strategies that intertwine key figures of feminine symbolism, such as Eve and the Witch. Additionally, I am interested in thinking through how practitioners and activists participating in the ‘season of the witch’ within contemporary political protest culture appropriate and subvert these historical strategies in an effort to challenge deep running Western discourses around ways of knowing.