Malcolm John Gaskill FRHistS (born 22 April 1967) is an English academic historian and writer on crime, magic, witchcraft, spiritualism, and the supernatural.

[1] He was educated at Rainham Mark Grammar School and Robinson College, Cambridge, reading History and graduating Ph.D. with a thesis on early modern England supervised by Keith Wrightson.

[3] While at the University of East Anglia, Gaskill was available to supervise research students interested in social and cultural history in the early modern period in England, especially on topics related to witchcraft and mentalities.

[3] The New York Times called Gaskill’s The Ruin of All Witches (2021), about a real life witch hunt in Springfield, Massachusetts, "a riveting history of life in a 17th-century New England frontier town", noting that a man’s nightmare had led to his being accused of witchcraft, flowing out of the colonists’ isolation stress, disease, and death.

In May 2020, during the first COVID-19 lockdown, Gaskill settled his early retirement from his teaching position, noting that universities were already "far from the sunlit uplands" and that they seemed to be about to "descend into a dark tunnel".