220052 Witchcraft on Trial: Analyzing Power, Justice, and Legal Narratives through Digital Tools (S) (WiSe 2025/2026)

This one-week Blended Intensive Program (BIP) seminar brings together students from four partner universities to examine how legal narratives are constructed, contested, and preserved in historical court records. Focusing on the Salem witchcraft trials as a central case study, the seminar combines historical interpretation with hands-on training in digital humanities tools to provide participants with both theoretical insight and practical experience.
Participants will work with digitized court records from the Salem trials to investigate how accusations, testimonies, and verdicts were embedded in the cultural, political, and social tensions of the time. Through this focused case study, the program invites students to consider how power was exercised, resisted, and recorded within the legal system, and how historical sources both reveal and obscure the lived experiences of individuals involved.
A key component of the seminar is the introduction to digital humanities methods that enhance and complicate traditional approaches to historical sources. Digital history tools will be introduced as a means to critically interrogate the sources, uncover hidden patterns, and ask new questions about the structures and dynamics of justice.

The intensive phase will take place at the Kadir Has University in Istanbul with an interdisciplinary and international group of students.
Collaborating universities include Bielefeld University, Kadir Has University Istanbul, the University of Vienna and the University of Oslo.