Witches in Early Modern England Project (website)
Witches have begun to proliferate online and making one's way to early modern witchcraft texts has never been easier. These projects help demystify early modern English witchcraft tracts by allowing researchers to navigate through a plethora of documents, organizing them by author and title, and exploring their contents through date, author, ESTC number, keyword searches, and paratextual inclusions. If we take the University of Exeter's digital maps, and the University of Virginia's work with GIS and visualization as an example, how can we work toward a system that takes advantage of the digitization of early English witchcraft tracts to help scholars effectively analyze the evolution of witches in early modern England and produce new research on their continued cultural resonance?

Shakespeare and Social Neuroscience (website)
The ways in which Shakespearean texts create affective experiences have been explored by Peter Brooks, Mary Crane, Gail Kern Paster, and Arthur Kinney, who have done much to link the material, conceptual, linguistic, and embodied in terms of Shakespearean criticism. Cognitive science, especially concepts such as embodied cognition and social neuroscience, could continue to produce intriguing inroads and models to better understand the ways in which meaning and experience are linguistically, conceptually, and socially embodied in individual members of the textual or physical audience and for the audience as a whole at a performance of a Shakespearean play.

Rage and Possession in Early Modern England
We speak about early English female spiritualities, sexualities, and bodies -- anorexic bodies of mystics, broken bodies of martyrs, the deformed infants of sectarian mothers -- and hypothesize how these women are read by their own cultures. We also think about their experience of their bodies in terms of containment in clothing, and birthing rooms, and writing closets or the ways in which bodies are exposed in the stocks, organized meetings, or were found far from home on missions. The physiological experience of these bodies is often gestured to, an act which seems fair -- to read bodies exposed in texts. This study explores those same early modern bodies inside out, to glean from the descriptions not only what is seen, and what is felt, but how those things are written not just onto exposed parts of bodies (lines of worry, sagging chests, bulging bellies) but how the most acute spiritual experiences are written inside the body, carved into sinews, muscles, nerves, brains. This study looks at what might be uncovered when we look at the problematic states of possession and bewitchment as embodied, in terms of micro-interiority, and as performed as public spectacle. It considers what is unveiled about the female spiritual experience when it is seen as, at least in part, an extreme, vicious, and embodied experience of rage.

Hold That Thought: Intelligence and Digital Tools
In terms of creating new visualization tools, Conway et al argue that minimal demands are placed on working memory when “information relevant to the judgment is provided on the computer screen. Memory representations do not need to be maintained in the face of concurrent processing” (167).  We might want to consider how the representation of data on the screen, is a kind of external processing; if the brain is not using working memory to process patterns on the screen, does that free up processing power to do other kinds of work? If we offload analytical processing to the analytics tools, to help process information for us, and we maintain memory representations on the screen, does this allow the user to engage fluid intelligence to seek the patterns which can not be seen?

Dark Sisters: Witches and Prophets in Early Modern England
The witch’s existence as a way to explain misfortune appears to make her an inversion of the miraculous that the prophet embodies. However, the female prophet’s appearance when critical and judicial belief in witches began to dwindle, and during the troubling time of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, suggests a more complicated relationship. Critics like Phyllis Mack, Hilary Hinds, Keith Thomas, and Stuart Clark have all noted moments of connectivity, but have, for the most part, looked at witches and prophets separately. Even the excellent work done by Diane Purkiss contains no substantial consideration of these intriguing women in conjunction. Early modern English witches and prophets appear, at first glance, to be antithetical, but are actually ideologically contingent. Witches use maleficium, an act of witchcraft performed with the intent of causing damage or injury. However, familiars do the witch’s dirty work, Satan allows the black magic to happen, and God ultimately authorizes of all of the above. Belief in malefic magic is, at the center, a belief in God’s continued interest in the world. The prophet, whose defining characteristic is also God-driven rhetorical power, needs a sympathetic audience, however. Unlike the majority of witches, she calls herself into being and, within the constraints of prophetic discourse, can define herself. Although, like the witch, the female prophet attracts criticism, violence, and judgment, she is able to give as good as she gets, and, for most part, has more agency and choice in negotiating her spiritual stance.

        For a short period, the witch and female prophet women shared a temporal space, and in some extreme circumstances, their startling similarities enabled them, as in the case of Barbara Blaugdone, to share the same skin. With an eye to the fact that chronology places most witches before female prophets, and that prophets published without censorship, this study will investigate how the witch and female prophet speak to each other, and the similar ways in which their identities were constructed through language, bodies, subject extensions, and local communities. In doing so, we can see how, with greater agency and success, the prophet organically took over from the witch the role of proving the existence of God and explaining misfortune to a world turned upside down.