Contact
Research Areas
Witchcraft and Contemporary Paganism; Women’s Spirituality; Goddess Worship; New Religious Movements
Education
Ph.D., New York University
M.A., Sussex University (England)
B.A., Brooklyn College of the CUNY
Links
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
Helen A. Berger
Helen A. Berger
Helen A. Berger is a sociologist who specializes in the study of contemporary Paganism and Witchcraft, a new religious movement which venerates the female divine to the exclusion of, or in conjuncture with, the male divine. She has published three books, an edited volume, and numerous articles and book chapters on this topic. Her first book, A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Pagans and Witches in the United States, won the A List Exceptional Books of 1999 Award. She has been interviewed on the topic of Witchcraft and Paganism by numerous newspapers including the New York Times and Washington Post. She has lectured both in the United States and Europe on the topic both at professional and public forum. She is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.
Current Projects
Relying on a large international survey of contemporary Pagans that I conducted, my current research examines the extent to which members of different sects or denominations of Paganism self-define as feminists, support issues that are consistent with feminism, and participate in direct political action related to feminism, and the extent to which gender issues are important in respondents’ conversion narratives.
Representative Publications
Berger, Helen A. and Douglas Ezzy. Teenage Witches: Magical Youth and the Search for the Self. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
Berger, Helen A., Evan A. Leach and Leigh S. Shaffer. Voices from the Pagan Census: Neo-Paganism in the United States. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.