Malcolm John Gaskill FRHistS (born 22 April 1967) is an English academic historian and writer on crime, magic, witchcraft, spiritualism, and the supernatural. Gaskill was a professor in the history department of the University of East Anglia from 2011 until 2020, when he retired from teaching to give more time to writing.
Born in Suffolk, Gaskill grew up in Kent.[1] He was educated at Rainham Mark Grammar School and Robinson College, Cambridge, reading History and graduating Ph.D. with a thesis on early modern England supervised by Keith Wrightson.[2]
Gaskill was briefly at Keele University as a lecturer for the year 1993–1994, and then at Queen’s University Belfast for the next academic year, before spending four years at Anglia Ruskin University. After that, he joined Churchill College, Cambridge, as a fellow and as Director of History Studies. In 2007, he transferred as a lecturer to the School of History of the University of East Anglia, where he was appointed as a professor in 2011.[3][4]
In 2010, he was a visiting fellow in North American studies at the British Library, while researching his book Between Two Worlds.[5]
Gaskill’s academic interests are in the cultural and social history of Britain and North America, especially the history of crime, magic, and witchcraft, between 1500 and 1800, and in 20th-century spiritualism and supernatural phenomena, with a focus on psychical research from 1920 to 1950. He has written chiefly about the history of witchcraft and witch-hunts.[3]
His book Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (2006) is a study of the witch-hunts of 1645–1647 in East Anglia.[3]
While at the University of East Anglia, Gaskill was available to supervise research students interested in social and cultural history in the early modern period in England, especially on topics related to witchcraft and mentalities.[3]
The New York Times called Gaskill’s The Ruin of All Witches (2021), about a real life witch hunt in Springfield, Massachusetts, "a riveting history of life in a 17th-century New England frontier town", noting that a man’s nightmare had led to his being accused of witchcraft, flowing out of the colonists’ isolation stress, disease, and death.[6]
In 2022, the book was shortlisted for a Wolfson History Prize, with the judges calling it "a riveting micro-history, brilliantly set within the broader cultural and social history of witchcraft."[7] By this time, Gaskill was a full-time writer.[8]
In 2018, his wife accepted a job in Dublin and he was able to take a year out to look after their children, finding that he did not miss academic life. In May 2020, during the first Covid-19 lockdown, Gaskill settled his early retirement from his teaching position, noting that universities were already "far from the sunlit uplands" and that they seemed to be about to "descend into a dark tunnel". His retirement was complete a few months later, and he explained his disillusion in an article in London Review of Books.[4]