Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead
Vampires are everywhere. Appearing on streaming services, in book series and on multimedia platforms, vampires and the undead are an integral part of popular culture in the twenty-first century. But vampires have a long and varied history across cultures from at least the early eighteenth century onwards. Nina Auerbach once commented on their cultural ubiquity: ‘Every age embraces the vampire it needs, and gets the vampire it deserves’.
The inherently transformative properties of vampires have made them uniquely able to reflect the age in which they appear. As a result, they provide original and multiple perspectives, not just on culture, but on established and emerging areas of study. Vampires and the undead serve as a useful lens for exploring Indigeneity, environmental studies and the ecogothic; identity, ethnicity and gender politics; material culture, spectatorship and fan cultures; hybridity, post-humanism and futurities; disability, mental health and ageing studies; and theology, philosophy and politics. These new territories and methodologies of vampire studies also retroactively shift the ways we view and understand earlier iterations of the undead and the different cultures they materialized from.
In this first book series dedicated to vampire studies, authors will explore the ongoing evolution of vampires and the undead in the broadest sense – including the supernatural, super-human and non-human, and across cultures, histories and media – and will use new theoretical frameworks to offer original and innovative readings of established and more recent texts. This original series aims to provide a focused hub for the diverse and often dispersed body of study that sees the vampire and the undead not as a subgenre of other categories such as the Gothic or horror, but as a genre in its own right that intersects with others.
An important dimension of the series is diversity and the inclusion of multiple cultural and minority perspectives, including LGBTQ+, disability, Indigeneity, and any approaches that encourage new ways of viewing the cultural impact of vampires and the undead and widen our understanding of an ever-expanding genre.
Proposals for monographs and edited collections are warmly invited. All projects undergo rigorous peer review. Please contact the series editor, Simon Bacon (baconetti@googlemail.com), or editorial@peterlang.com for more information.
Editorial Board: Stacey Abbott (Birkbeck, University of London), Katarzyna Ancuta (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand), Uzoamaka Melissa Anyiwo (University of Scranton, USA), John Edgar Browning (Savannah College of Art and Design, USA), S. Brooke Cameron (Queen's University, Canada), Sir Christopher Frayling, Tabish Khair (University of Aarhus, Denmark), Lorna Piatti-Farnell (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand), Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK), Cristina Santos (Brock University, Canada), Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University, USA), Laura Westengard (City University of New York).