"The fact that I don’t fit into neat tidy boxes is, in my view, a feature, not a bug."  

Dr. Amy Hale (PhD Folklore UCLA) is an Atlanta based writer, curator, and critic, ethnographer and folklorist, speaking and writing about magic, art, culture, women and Cornwall. She writes and speaks on topics as diverse as psychogeography, Cornish ethnonationalism, Pagan religious tourism, color theory, and extremist politics in modern Paganism.

She has written widely on the surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, and in 2009 she received a grant from the Paul Mellon Foundation for her research. Her biography of Colquhoun, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (2020) is widely praised as being both erudite and readable. Her most recent volume, Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love, Ithell Colquhoun (2024), published by Tate Publishing is an eye opening, boundary shattering collection of Colquhoun’s erotic occult works and poetry. A Walking Flame: Selected Magical Essays of Ithell Colquhoun is anticipated in late 2024 from Strange Attractor Press.

Hale is also the editor of the groundbreaking collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (2022). Other co-edited collections include New Directions in Celtic Studies, Inside Merlin’s Cave: A Cornish Arthurian Reader, and The Journal of the Academic Study of Magic 5. As a gallery writer and essayist, she has contributed essays for Tate, Burlington Contemporary, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Correspondences Journal, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and Spike Island, Bristol.

Hale has served as curator and host for the internationally beloved London based Viktor Wynd’s Last Tuesday Society lecture series, which features accessible specialist lectures for a popular audience. Hale has also been a content advisor and curator for festivals and exhibitions. She was content specialist for Tamarisk 2000: A Festival of Celtic Culture and the Environment in Newquay, Cornwall, and was on the organizing staff of the First Annual Festival of Southern Art and Culture in Orlando, Florida. She has also consulted for English Heritage and the Cornwall Tourist Board, helping to promote culturally-sensitive tourism development. She has been featured on BBC Radio Cornwall and the BBC World Service and is a regular guest on a variety of podcasts and lecture series.

A lively public speaker, Hale has addressed a wide variety of academic and popular events, including Harvard Divinity School, the Philosophical Research Society, the Occult Humanities Conference at NYU, I:MAGE at the Warburg Institute in London, the Occulture Festival in Berlin and the OZORA festival in Hungary. She is the past Co-Chair of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Section for the American Academy of Religion (AAR), a member of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) and the British Arts Network.  She is also an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Communications at Falmouth University and is a trustee of the British charity Rediscovering Art by Women (RAW/RAW+).

She resides in Atlanta with her family, cats, and a 250-year-old oak tree.