Biography

Malcolm Gaskill was born in Suffolk in 1967. He grew up in Kent, attending Rainham Mark Grammar School from where in 1984 he won a place to read history at Robinson College, Cambridge. Following a year working and travelling he began his degree, in the final year of which he wrote a dissertation on witchcraft in Kent 1640-60, a version of which was later published. After graduation in 1989 he was admitted to Jesus College and awarded a Cambridge University studentship to fund doctoral research into crime in early modern England, a project supervised by Professor Keith Wrightson. This work was completed during 1993-4, in which time he held a lectureship in early modern history at Keele University. This was followed first by a year teaching at Queen's University, Belfast, then a four-year stint in the History Department of ARU in Cambridge.

In 1999 Gaskill was appointed Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Churchill College, Cambridge. The following year Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England was published by Cambridge University Press, and was shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book of the Year prize. Meanwhile, work was underway on spiritualism in twentieth-century Britain, resulting in a second book, Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches, published by 4th Estate in 2001. In 2003 he edited a volume of contemporary printed pamphlets about the witch-hunt of the 1640s - work in progress for Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, published in 2005 by John Murray in the UK and Harvard University Press in the USA. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Today Gaskill teaches early modern social and cultural history at the University of East Anglia, writes and reviews for scholarly journals and the popular press, and speaks frequently at societies, festivals, seminars and conferences, at home and abroad. He is also a regular contributor and consultant to television and radio. Current writing projects include a short book on witchcraft for Oxford University Press, and an article on spiritualism and the decriminalization of mediumship in 1951; research into the English colonization of America, 1607-92 is underway. He lives in Cambridgeshire with his partner Sheena Peirse, a new media producer for Channel Four, and their daughter Kate.