Charles Zika

Biography

Charles Zika graduated from the University of Melbourne with majors in History and Middle Eastern Studies. He continued his postgraduate studies at the University of TÜbingen, West Germany, where he researched and wrote an MA (submitted to the University of Melbourne) on the German humanist Johann Reuchlin and the Renaissance occult tradition at the turn of the sixteenth-century. After a year as a Teaching Fellow at Monash University, he took up a Lectureship in History at the University of Melbourne. His publications have been in European history between the fifteenth and seventeenth-centuries, and have covered such areas as humanism and magic, the German Reformation, the social construction of knowledge, sexuality and moral order, religious practices and authority, folklore and celebrations of the past, the body and cannibalism, and images of witchcraft. In recent years his two main research interests have been the use of the visual in the understanding of history and the visual representation of witchcraft in early modern Europe.