Emma Quilty is a social anthropologist who works in the field of feminist science and technology studies. Based at Monash University, she is a research fellow in the Centre for Excellence for The Elimination of Violence Against Women. She studies shifting practices of algorithmic harm and gender violence, and how they are facilitated by digital infrastructures and emerging systems like artificial intelligence. Emma’s writing explores technology, power and gender and has been published in, Trauma Violence & Abuse, AI & Society, Mobilites, and Senses & Society.

Her book Witch Power, based on in-depth ethnographic research with contemporary witchcraft communities, explores dynamics of gender, power, and resistance.

Witch Power: Hexing the Patriarchy with Feminist Magic (Polity Books, 2025), is now available for purchase!

Kind words about Witch Power:

“Immersive, precise, and heartfelt, Witch Power revitalizes the study of ‘witchy feminism’ for this moment. With nuance and care, anthropologist Emma Quilty fearlessly addresses the pitfalls, political potency, and transformative magic of feminist witchcraft both in theory and in practice.”

— Kristen J. Sollée, author of Witches, Sluts, Feminists

"If you are ready to move beyond how-to witchcraft books and critically engage with the real-world complexities of feminist witchcraft practice and politics, Witch Power is the book you've been searching for. Defying the anthropological gaze of the outsider, Quilty's thoughtful journey into the lived experiences of witches in Australia and the United States is made possible by her own position as both a feminist scholar and a witch. An exemplar of the kind of feminist research on witches and witchcraft that is long overdue, Witch Power is witchy feminism at its finest!"

—Jane Ward, co-editor of The Witch Studies Reader

"We need our witch power now more than ever. It is on the backs of women lost to history as the crazed wife in the attic, or the herbalist healing her sisters after an abortion, and all those burned, buried, and forgotten that we owe to keep writing our histories against a dystopian wall of erasure."

—Sophia Shalmiyev, author of Mother Winter

"Emma Quilty's Witch Power is a one-of-a-kind magical journey into the private world of witches, covens and witchcraft. Readers are taken on a personal journey across the globe from New Age essential oil 'Tupperware' parties in Queensland Australia to the world of a Voodoo priestess in New Orleans. A must-read for the merely curious as well as for practitioners of witchcraft."

—Soma Chaudhuri, author of Tempest in a Teapot

Photo by Laura Du Ve