Dr Michael Ostling (Postdoctoral Research Fellow)

 BA (Reed), MA (Toronto), PhD (Toronto).

 Michael Ostling earned his PhD in Religious Studies from the Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, in 2008. His doctoral dissertation, founded on research undertaken through a Fulbright Fellowship Poland, forms the basis for his first book: Between the Devil and the Host: Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland (Oxford, 2011). Michael has also published articles on ritual desecration, the Antichrist, and Harry Potter. In recent years undergraduate pedagogy has become a secondary focus of Michael’s research and activism; while teaching at Central Michigan University (2008-2012) he was an active member of that institution’s Union of Teaching Faculty and its Teaching and Learning Collective.

Michael joined the Centre as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in July 2012, and is working on a book project tentatively titled Small Gods: Goblins, Fairies, and Demons at the Margins of Christendom. The book will explore goblins (and allied fictive preternatural beings) as creatures uniquely “good to think” about tradition, superstition, and paganism.

Email:  m.ostling@uq.edu.au

Room: 508

Telephone:  (07) 334 69496

Books

Recent Articles and Book Chapters

  • "'Poison and Enchantment Rule Ruthenia,' Witchcraft, Superstition, and Ethnicity in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth," Russian History 40, 1, (forthcoming September 2013).
  • "Witchcraft in Poland: Milk and Malefice," in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming May 2013).
  • "Teaching Trends: A Guide for the Perturbed," Teaching and Learning Collective, Central Michigan University (September 2012).
  • "Konstytucja 1543 r. i początki procesów o czary w Polsce," Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce 49 (2005).
  • "Nieznany proces o czary i świętokradztwo w Lublinie, 1643," Lud, 89 (2005).

A full CV is available here


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