NEH grant to fund professor’s podcast ‘Magic in the United States’

Professor of Digital Media Heather Freeman was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to produce the podcast, “Magic in the United States: 400 Years of Magical Beliefs, Practices and Cultural Conflicts.”

The $389,000 grant will fund the production of three seasons of the podcast, which will explore how magical beliefs and practices have evolved in the U.S. from the 1600s to the present. The podcast will be marketed and distributed by Public Radio International and made available for free through all major podcast outlets.

“Magic in the United States” will debut in October, and each season will include six 20- to 30-minute episodes.

According to Freeman, “The goal of this podcast is twofold. First, it will expand the audience’s understanding of magical beliefs and practices prevalent throughout recorded American history, allowing the public to have a greater appreciation for the rich diversity of religious traditions within the United States. Second, it will illustrate how these often-misunderstood and marginalized beliefs both inspired and clashed with one another, facilitating the cross-pollination of ideas and practices from one community to another while simultaneously laying the groundwork for cultural conflict.”

Each episode will feature interviews with scholars from a range of academic disciplines, including history, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, and journalism, as well as contemporary magic practitioners and knowledgeable laypeople.

This new podcast will be the latest work to emerge from research Freeman began years ago. Since 2016, she has interviewed dozens of academic experts and magic practitioners from around the world and spent a month in residency at the Museum for Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, in 2018.

Throughout her many investigations into topics of magic, mythology, pop culture, regionalism and technology, Freeman continues to develop stunning 2-D visual artworks. From 2016-2018, Freeman created the Carolinian Herbal, a print series relating the “urban lore about the native and naturalized plants and animals of the North Carolina Piedmont with my own contemporary mythos, understandings of the spirits of the land which I occupy, and methods of co-existing in a manner of mutual respect and supportive growth.”

In 2022, Freeman collaborated with Berlin-based software engineer Tres Henry to develop Mosaic, a natively-digital divination system available for free on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Currently, Freeman is developing a series of mixed media prints about her creative and magical collaboration with an generative AI called Öccane, and she is creating an interactive diary in Unreal Engine 5 of her Decan Walk, a year-long meditation on the 36 astrological decans.

Read more on the College of Arts + Architecture website.