Guest Lecture

Guest Lecture by Benjamin Brand (University of Pittsburgh)

This talk traces the protean figure of “the witch” across Western cultural history and its transcultural adaptations. Beginning with Greek antiquity, we follow this archetype’s development and transformation during the European witch craze, examining how witch-finding manuals like the Malleus Maleficarum codified witchcraft within a demonological framework. Simultaneously, a visual standards of witch representation are solidified, and, for the first time, mass distributed via reproducible illustrations. Encoded and portable, the Western witch tropes became instruments of power during colonial expansion, weaponized against creole and indigenous spiritual practices in Africa and the Americas.
In the 20th century, the discourse seems to pivot radically. Rehabilitative portrayals, such as those in American television shows like /Bewitched/, domesticated and destigmatized witchcraft, creating templates that influenced early Japanese anime aimed at female audiences. The pop cultural exchange of the Western witch trope directly influences Hayao Miyazaki’s landmark film Kiki's Delivery Service (1989). Here, what has defined the witch trope is mostly abandoned, save for the minimal iconographic markers of ‘broom’ and ‘black cat.’
Kiki, as a Japanese reimagining of European aesthetics is not only a surprisingly ‘radical’ feminist endpoint of a discourse born in/perpetuated by most extreme forms of misogyny, but also a demonstration that the dissemination of ‘Western culture,’ through the many formations of the colonial project, is, despite its inherent power asymmetries, never a one-way street. It does not leave its object unchanged and has the potential to subvert the concept of acculturation, and, to some extent, traditional gender expectations.

Bio: 

Benjamin Brand graduated from TU Dortmund in 2009 with a Master’s degree in Applied Literary and Cultural Studies, and subsequently completed his Ph.D. at Brown University (Providence, RI) in 2016 with a dissertation on Johann Peter Hebel, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald. Dr. Brand has published on Hebel and the salvific potential in the polyphonic and polysemantic spaces of his calendar prose. In addition, he gave talks on Goethe’s lead pencil, Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad, and female figures as textual resistance in Sebald’s narrations. Since 2018, Benjamin Brand has been working in the German Department at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches classes in German and English that cover language, literature, and cultural studies. He received the Provost’s Award for Diversity in the Curriculum in 2021 and has worked as the Department's Internship coordinator since 2024.

Date: Wednesday, June 04 2025
Time: 4 pm
Location: American Studies Foyer (EF 50)

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