Professional Background
Catherine McNally is a visiting assistant professor in German studies at Mount Holyoke College. She holds a PhD in German studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a bachelor’s degree from Bennington College.
Dr. McNally’s research centers on practices such as witchcraft, divination, and other esoteric traditions and how they have been represented, debated, and transformed from early modern Europe to the contemporary world. She examines how the occult has been mobilized in different political contexts, as both a tool of resistance and a means of reinforcing power. In her current project, she looks at the afterlives of these traditions in the twenty-first century, analyzing how they circulate in digital media, alternative spiritual communities, and popular culture. This work pays particular attention to the politics of cultural appropriation, the commodification of spiritual practices, and the ways race, gender, and colonial histories shape who is seen as a legitimate practitioner.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellow, Catherine McNally will conduct research on how magical thinking, ritual practices, and folk cosmologies functioned as subtle yet meaningful forms of resistance and resilience during the Holocaust. Focusing on Jewish, Romani, and Eastern European contexts, this study asks: how did people under genocidal threat turn to alternative, embodied knowledge systems to endure and interpret catastrophe? At the same time, it interrogates the mythic and theatrical dimensions of Nazi power that have often been mischaracterized as occultism. By attending to how belief circulated within camps, ghettos, and refugee communities, this project reveals resistance not only as defiance but also as meaning-making. This project draws on testimonies, unpublished diaries, visual artifacts, and ephemeral materials to investigate how ritual and spiritual practice appear in the archival record, often on the margins or in fragments, and what these traces reveal about alternative ways of knowing and resisting.
Fellowship Period: November 1, 2025 – April 30, 2026