Rochelle Rojas has been awarded the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Fellowship for Religion and Ethics, administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The Newcombe Fellowship is designed to encourage original and significant study of ethical or religious values in all fields of the humanities and social sciences, and is provided to Ph.D. candidates at American institutions who will complete their dissertations during the 2015-16 academic year. In the current Newcombe competition, 22 fellows were chosen from a pool of over 500 candidates and were awarded for $25,000 for 12 months of full-time dissertation writing.
Rochelle will use this funding to complete her dissertation entitled "Witch Crafting in Early Modern Navarra, 1525-1675", which examines witch trials in a part of Europe that lacked intensive witch hunts: sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain. By turning attention away from bizarre and sensational witch panics, and privileging local, secular witch trials, her project demystifies witchcraft by situating it within its religious and social contexts. A close-reading and discourse analysis of the incredibly rich and lengthy testimonies of villagers, priests, and jurists in early modern Navarra reveals that witch beliefs were adaptive, normal and even "rational" in regions that never suffered convulsive witch persecutions.
History
