Debra Lavelle

Debra Lavelle is a doctoral candidate in Northeastern University’s World History Department. She focuses on women and witchcraft in America and is working on a dissertation entitled “A Desirable Calamity: Magic, the Body, and Transgressive Women in the Visual Culture and Public History of the Salem Witch Trials”. She received her undergraduate degrees in Art History and Archaeology from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and her Master’s degree in Art History from George Washington University in Washington, DC. Debra has taught global art history courses at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She recently participated in an educator’s panel, Central Conversations, following a production of The Crucible at Central Square Theater in Cambridge. She is particularly interested in how the visual and public presentations of the Salem Witch Trials have impacted ideas about gender, sexuality, and the female body from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. Her other areas of interest include Ireland, Mexico, and East Asia.