An extraordinary substance: A history of blood and demons across time

Ainslie Rockall-Mills

Ainslie Rockall-Mills received her BA in Archaeology from Macquarie University, and is currently an Advanced MSc Postgraduate from the Australian National University who specialises in Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology. Her research interests include the diagnosis of trauma in cremated human remains and the bioarchaeology of witch-hunting in early modern Europe. She has two forthcoming articles on this work, to appear in World Archaeology Magazine and British Archaeology Magazine in mid-2026.

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Andrea Scasso

Andrea Scasso holds a Ph.D. in Ecclesiastical and Canon Law from the University of Naples Federico II and has formerly served as a Professor at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome. A practicing attorney, he is admitted to the Supreme Court of Cassation and acts as an advocate before the Tribunal of the Roman Rota. His research explores the interdisciplinary and historical intersections between religious institutions, canonical frameworks, and the medical sciences. He further advanced his specialisation by earning a Second-Level Master’s Degree in Religions, Esoterisms, and New Spiritualities: Evolutions and Perspectives from the University of Pisa.

Badreddine Messikh

"Badreddine Messikh is a Master's student in Islamic Creed (ʿAqīdah) and Kalām at the Faculty of Usul al-Din, Emir Abdelkader University for Islamic Sciences, Algeria. His research interests include Islamic theology, philosophy of religion, science and religion, Islamic philosophy, Transcendent Philosophy (al-Ḥikmah al-Mutaʿāliyah), and comparative religion. His work focuses on developing contemporary theological approaches to philosophical and religious questions, with particular emphasis on the ontological and epistemological foundations of Islamic doctrinal concepts. He participated remotely in The 4th International Conference on Theology, Religion, Culture, and Humanities, where he presented research in the field of theology and religious studies. He also participated in the International Workshop on Science and Religion hosted by Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul, which brought together scholars specializing in philosophy of science, theology, and religious studies. His current research seeks to build meaningful dialogue between the Islamic theological tradition and contemporary philosophical debates, highlighting the contribution of Islamic Kalām to global discussions in philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and comparative theology"

Beril Huri

Beril Huri completed her MA in English Studies: Language, Literature, and Culture at Freie Universität Berlin and recently started her PhD at Cankaya University, Ankara, Turkiye. Her research interests include poetics and poetry, women’s writing, literature and the body, feminist theory, and affect theory.

Brian Collins

Brian Collins is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He is the author of three books on Hinduism and religious studies and is the co-editor of Bollywood Horrors: Religion, Violence, and Cinematic Fears in India (2020) and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to the Mahābhārata. His most recent book projects are Am I in Heaven? King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s Metamodern Music and Mythology, in press with Bloomsbury Academic, and Rāma Jāmadagnya as Symptom and Symbol of Brahmin Ideology: The Work of Culture in the Mahābhārata, under contract with Sanctum Books.

Christa Kessler

Christa Müller-Kessler is Privatdozent at the Institute of Oriental Studies at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. She specialises in Semitic languages, including the cuneiform languages of Mesopotamia. In addition to grammatical and lexical studies, her focus lies on the decipherment of palimpsest manuscripts in Aramaic and various other epigraphic materials, such as metal (amulets), earthenware bowls, and stone in Northwest Semitic languages. Apart from her philological interests, she deals with religious concepts and interchanges between late antique cults of Iranian and Mesopotamian deities.

Charlotte Ní Choncheanainn

Charlotte Ní Choncheanainn completed her Bachelor of Arts (History) at the University of Melbourne and wrote her Honours thesis on the intersections between medicine and witchcraft. She is currently pursuing independent research.

Emmanuel Ofuasia

Emmanuel Ofuasia is a decoloniality research associate in University of Pretoria’s Philosophy Department. He is a researcher with the Pan-Africana Policy and Research Group (PANAFSTRAG), and member of Conversational Society of Philosophy (CSP), Nigeria. His primary areas of research interest are: (Process) Metaphysics, African Philosophy (of Religion), Philosophical Logic, Ethnomathematics, and Ifá. His publications in these areas have appeared as papers in journals and books in globally-renowned publishing firms like Springer, Brill, Routledge, and Palgrave Macmillan. In addition to publishing, Emmanuel Ofuasia is also a recipient of local and international grants from organizations and institutions such as: Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion in conjunction with the John Templeton Foundation (JTF), as well as Culture and Animal Foundation (CAF), New York, USA.

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Jake Ballinger

Jake Ballinger is an MA student in National Taiwan University's Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. His research primarily focuses on comparisons and receptions of Greco-Roman literature in 20th-century modernism and post-Meiji Japan, with a focus on the politics and aesthetics of male bodies and queer texts. He works across English, Ancient Greek, Latin, Japanese, and romance languages.

Jack Thajer

I am a scholar of classics and ancient history with a focus on Ancient Greco-Roman mythology and folktales. I first completed my undergraduate degree with a double major in History and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at Trent University and am now completing my MA in Classics at the University of Exeter. Here I have honed my specialization into studying Greek and Roman folklore, writing papers on Philinnion and necrophilia stories in myth. My ongoing dissertation is on birth and monstrousness in Greek myths and the intersection of otherness and disability within the cultural imagination.

John Foulk

John Foulk is a PhD student in Classical Studies at the University of Florida. He holds a BA and an MA in Classics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include satire, parody, katabaseis (Underworld narratives), and demonology in the Greek literary tradition, especially eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantine literature.

Joyeeta Das

Joyeeta Das is an academic scholar, educator, and published writer. She serves as Adjunct Faculty at the University of Puget Sound. Joyeeta holds master's degrees in Comparative Religion (University of Washington, Seattle) and English Literature (EFLU, Hyderabad). Her academic research focuses on South Asian textual traditions and gender studies, which she balances with a passionate pursuit of creative writing, poetry, and mindfulness.

Kathryn Morris

Kathryn Morris is an Assistant Professor in the Early Modern Studies Program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her teaching and research interests include the history of the vampire and early modern witchcraft beliefs. She is currently co-editing, with Peter Dendle and Sarah Hughes, a volume on the history and politics of demonization.

Kurmo Konsa

Kurmo Konsa is Professor and Head of the Department of Conservation and Restoration at Pallas University of Applied Sciences, Estonia, and is affiliated with the University of Tartu. His research interests include conservation theory, cultural heritage, material culture, folklore, knowledge systems, and the history of information. His recent work explores the intersections of heritage, artificial cultures, material imagination, and vernacular theories of matter and transformation.

Raísa Nogueira Medeiros

Raísa Nogueira Medeiros is a PhD candidate in History of Law and Institutions at Université Paris Nanterre, where she also holds a master's degree. Her research focuses on the interactions between Law and Literature. Her master's dissertation, entitled "The Representation of the Criminal in the Works of Victor Hugo: A Historical-Legal-Literary Analysis from Han d'Islande to Les Misérables," already explored this perspective.She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on the legal proceedings against novels for obscenity during the French Third Republic.

Robert Welch

I am a doctoral student in the history department at Marquette University, specializing in the religious, cultural and intellectual history of later mediaeval and early modern Europe (15th -later 17th Centuries).

Rose Thomas

My name is Rose Madeleine Kenilworth Thomas, (Kanak, Greenslade, Tainui, Ngāti Kahungungu) I am an indigenous animal historian, researching European perspectives of animals, environments and identities in medieval and early modern travel writing. Currently, I am working on a PhD with the supervision of Prof Kim Phillips and Dr Joseph Zizek. My focus is on the ways in which writers have framed animal subjects to convey coded language, secular narratives and scientific theories. These descriptions often contain metaphorical language, anthropomorphism and discussions of divergent spiritual beliefs. Hence, I am finding medieval and early modern animal histories are useful sources for thinking about intersecting cultural knowledge, how natural history changed over time, and differing diplomatic approaches.

Stamatis Zochios

Stamatis Zochios is Principal Researcher at the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre of the Academy of Athens, Editor-in-Chief of Études balkaniques – Cahiers Pierre Belon, and an Associate Member of Eur’ORBEM (CNRS–Sorbonne Université). His research focuses on lived Orthodoxy, vernacular religion, exorcism and possession, Slavic and Byzantine religious traditions, and the history of demonology and magic in Eastern Europe. He is currently preparing his Habilitation (Habilitation à diriger des recherches) on Orthodox exorcism and leads several international research projects on Slavic religious history, Christian demonology, and the reception of pre-Christian traditions in Eastern Europe.

Tofie Benson

Tofie Benson holds a doctorate in Ancient History and Archaeology researching childhood and family life in the ancient world. Her research examines the place of children within the oikos and the ways in which family relationships were constructed and represented in Greek culture. She has particular interests in ancient theatre, visual culture and emotions.

Verity Bruce

Verity Bruce completed her PhD in History in 2026 at the University of Exeter. Her thesis focused on thirteenth-century saints, the performance of agender identity, and how demons facilitate such performances. She has published on St Michael Archangel’s non-binary gender and how he can serve as a model for understanding saintly gender.

Victoria Burns-Price

Dr Victoria Burns Price received her PhD in Medieval History from the University of Reading in 2021, with her thesis: “From sortilegio to diabolical sorcery: theological and canonistic developments from Lombard and Gratian to Inquisitorial handbooks”. She is a Departmental Tutor at the University of Oxford teaching on Medieval Magic and the Early Modern Witch Hunts. She is also currently writing a book on the commentaries of Peter Lombard’s Sentences for Routledge’s Approaching Medieval Sources series.

Wildan Muhammad

Wildan Imaduddin Muhammad is a PhD student in Islamic Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and a lecturer at UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Indonesia. His current research examines biblical references in Indonesian Quranic commentaries, with broader interests in Christian–Muslim scriptural reception, Arabic Early Manuscripts, and comparative theology.

Tiana Blazevic

Tiana Blazevic has just submitted her PhD in Medieval History at Macquarie University. Her work uses sociological research methods to analyse 13-14th century medical texts on epilepsy. Her work offers new models of categorisation for epilepsy treatments—diagnostic, prevention/intervention, and celestial materiality—to reflect medieval understandings of diseases and demons in the medieval period.

Ryan Denson

Ryan Denson is Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, working as part of the NCN-funded project “Beyond the Sacred: Conceptions of Nature in Byzantium (4th–15th centuries)”. His research focuses on folklore and cultural conceptions of the supernatural, imaginary animals, and the natural environment in the ancient Greco-Roman and Byzantine worlds.

Charlotte Spence

Charlotte Spence is a lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Oxford. She completed her PhD at the University of Exeter, which examined the conceptions of the dead and the gods in ancient curse tablets. Before that, Charlotte studied Ancient History at the University of Birmingham. Her research continues to be on ancient curse inscriptions. She is currently working on her next monograph, which focuses on the use of Jewish and Christian powers in curse tablets in Late Antiquity.