Diane Purkiss

Diane Purkiss is a feminist SF scholar, focuse in particular on fairy tales, folklore, and witchcraft.

Biographies

Fellow in English, Keble College, University of Oxford

Diane Purkiss belongs to the Faculty of English at Oxford University, and is Fellow and Tutor at Keble College. She has written a number of seminal scholarly works on fairies, folklore and witchcraft, which include At The Bottom of the Garden, Troublesome Things: a History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (2001), and The Witch in History: Early Modern and Late Twentieth Century Representations (1996). She is the first current member of the Oxford English Faculty since C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to have published children’s books: she has co-authored, with her adolescent son Michael, the critically acclaimed and popular Corydon trilogy, a fantasy series featuring creative reworkings of classical Greek myth. Purkiss’s other publications reflect her eclectic research interests in Renaissance literature, the history of religion and popular culture: her books include The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006). Her numerous articles and chapters range over the topics of early modern girlhood, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, Milton, Marvell and the history of food. Her current work examines Scottish witch trials and their links with fairies and pre-Christian myths and practices, with attention to ballads and related folklore. She is also completing a book on food, and has begun thinking about ruined monasteries and the genesis of the supernatural in relation to early modern Britain.

Dr. Purkiss was educated at the University of Queensland, Australia and at Oxford, where she did her doctorate at Merton College. Subsequently, she taught at the Universities of East Anglia, Reading, and Exeter as Lecturer and then Professor before taking up her current position at Keble. As an enthusiastic cultural commentator, Purkiss reviews the Times Literary Supplement, the Sunday Telegraph, the Telegraph, the Guardian, and she appears frequently on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and on BBC TV.