Following on from my previous roundups in 2019, 2020-21, and 2022-23, here I want to take stock of my publications over the past couple of years. As always, it has been a busy period for me, one dominated by reading, writing, and teaching – I have been running courses on witchcraft and Paganism at City Lit in central London while also working as a visiting lecturer in Folklore at the University of Hertfordshire.
At the invitation of series editor Rebecca Moore, a few years ago I was asked to contribute to Cambridge University Press’ series on Elements in New Religious Movements. The result, published in 2024, was The New Witches of the West: Tradition, Liberation, and Power, a short monograph examining various forms of modern religious witchcraft in comparative perspective. The book focused in particular on the reasons why various people, living in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, chose to call themselves “witches” given the bloody history and contentious nature of that term. One thing that I hope readers take away from the book is the value of examining different forms of modern religious witchcraft (Wicca, traditional witchcraft, LaVeyan Satanism etc) alongside each other, rather than relegating them to different intellectual silos. This sort of comparative analysis is an approach that I have also taken in further studies on the cultural history of witchcraft and which I hope shall see the light of day in 2026.
Another of my books, this time with a longer gestation, also came out in 2024 – Modern Religious Druidry: Studies in Paganism, Celtic Identity, and Nature Spirituality. This was an edited volume, one that I co-assembled with my colleague Jonathan Woolley, and was designed to address the comparative lacunae of research on those new religious groups whose practitioners call themselves “Druids” after the Iron Age ritualists of Western Europe. A range of scholars contributed chapters to the volume, many of them practicing Druids themselves, with the eminent academics Ronald Hutton and Graham Harvey providing the foreword and afterword, respectively. I really hope that the volume, which is published in the Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities series, will encourage further scholarly awareness and interest in modern religious Druidry, a much-overlooked yet intriguing phenomenon.
Probably my favourite of the publications I put out in the past two years was an article published in the Folklore journal. Titled “God of the Witches, Woden Incarnate, or Son of Herne? On the Genealogy of the Pagan Robin Hood,” it reflected my longstanding fascination with British legend and the ways in which it has been reinterpreted and utilised over time. In particular, the article takes a historical approach in exploring how the Robin Hood legend complex has been interpreted as pertaining to forms of pre-Christian religion, not only by scholars but also by modern Pagans and writers of fiction. Remaining within the broader realms of folklore research, I also contributed a short chapter, “The Cottingley Case in Modern Esoteric Fairy Literature,” to an edited volume on The Cottingley Fairy Photographs: New Approaches to Fairies, Fakes and Folklore. This was edited by Simon Young, one of the most important scholars of British supernatural lore, and published through his accessible imprint, Pwca Books. A free copy of the chapter can be found here.
These past two years have also seen me continue my work with the Encyclopedia Britannica, helping to improve their coverage of various esoteric and new religious movements. To that end, they have published my articles on witchcraft, the early modern witch trials, occult, occultism, esotericism, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and Thelema. Short pieces of mine have also appeared in various academic publications. I contributed four mini-chapters (“Is Paganism a Nature Religion?,” “Do Pagans Have Sacred Sites?,” “Are Satanism and Paganism the Same?,” and “Do Pagans Have Particular Political Views?”) to Suzanne Owens and Angela Puca’s edited volume on Pagan Religions in Five Minutes (Equinox, 2025) and a short piece on “Wicca and the Web” for Jeffrey H. Mahan and James H. Thrall’s second edition of Media, Religion and Culture: An Introduction (Routledge, 2026).
Since the start of 2024 I have also produced fourteen published book reviews for a range of academic publications, including Folklore, Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, and Reading Religion – the review website of the American Academy of Religion, on whose editorial board I continue to sit. These reviews explored some fantastic titles, covering such topics as Devil lore in the English landscape, modern religious shamanism in Italy and Scandinavia, and the reception of pre-Christian religion in European history. Finally, as lead director of interviews for the World Religions and Spirituality Project (WRSP), I have also conducted interviews with Lorne Dawson, Kimberly Kirner, Donald Westbrook, Susan J. Palmer, and Angela Puca, discussing their research into a wide range of religious traditions from Salafist-jihadism to Scientology. These are all free to read, so please do take a look if they sound of interest.
