Do You Believe in Fairies? Dr Simon Young’s Fairy Census‘
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Oberon, that all the fairies should be counted…‘
In 2014 Simon Young began the Fairy Census, a project to collect two thousand fairy experiences. Now a decade later Young has published a thousand of these accounts and aims to reach two thousand by 2035. He has used the resulting database to study the people who see fairies. For instance, what age are fairy seers? Why are the fairies seen shrinking in size? Why are women more likely to see fairies than men? Why do driving and watching television seem to increase the likelihood of a fairy encounter? And what about the growing number of fairy wings? For this and many more fairy world problems and for thoughts on how we interact with the supernatural more generally tune in to see Simon speak about on the Fairy Census, 12 Jan 2025.
Bio
Dr Simon Young is a British folklore historian based in Italy. He has written extensively on the nineteenth-century supernatural. His book The Boggart (from Exeter University Press) and The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends (from Mississippi University Press) came out in 2022. He is the editor of Exeter New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Legends and teaches history at UCEAP (Florence). Over the years he has run courses on the History of Christianity, Italian Food History, Italian Media History, Contemporary Italian History, the Second World War in Italy and Italian Renaissance History.
Articles listing: https://independent.academia.edu/SimonYoung43
Latest books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boggart-Folklore-History-Placenames-Approaches/dp/1905816901/ref
[Free downloadable source book, click ‘open access]: https://www.exeterpress.co.uk/en/Book/2114/The-Boggart-Sourcebook.html
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
