Contact: Rick Hellman, 785-864-8852, [email protected]
KU experts can speak on scary seasonal topics for Halloween
LAWRENCE — Witches and zombies, vampires, ghosts and gargoyles – there are University of Kansas experts available to expound on our fascination with most literary, stage and screen spirits this Halloween season.
Jane Barnette, associate professor in KU’s Department of Theatre & Dance, says her research into the portrayal of witchcraft on stage and screen matches her own interest as a practitioner. She spoke about both in an episode of KU News Service’s “When Experts Attack!” podcast in 2020.
Barnette has just written a chapter on #WitchTok, a subculture within the TikTok app, for the forthcoming book from Routledge publishers, “TikTok Cultures,” edited by viral dance sensation and educator Trevor Boffone. Also, her article on the 1836 play American play “Witchcraft” by Joanna Baillie will be in this year’s Theatre History Studies journal.
Paul Scott, associate professor of French and an affiliate of KU’s J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, has a sideline as a zombie expert, having written extensively about modern manifestations of the flesh-eating ghoul trope. Last year, he published an article titled “From Contagion to Cogitation: The Evolving Television Zombie” in the journal Science Fiction Studies. He’s working on a book on the subject, recently expanding his subject matter to include the South Korean series “Zombie Detective” and “Sweet Home.” Scott spoke at the June 2021 conference of the Science Fiction Research Association, giving a paper titled “A Rational Zombie’s Critique of Capitalism in Zombie Detective.” He will be teaching a winter-session class, French 150, titled “Zombies, Aliens, Monsters.”
Shape-shifting bloodsuckers have proven to be popular subject matter for Ani Kokobobo, associate professor and chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Languages & Literatures. She is once again teaching Slavic 230 this semester – The Vampire in Literature, Film & Television. The course surveys the historical development of the vampire, i.e., Dracula, legend in Eastern Europe leading up to its contemporary cinematic and pop culture variations. The professor said she has learned from teaching the class that, “Since the vampire is a figure that, by definition, often has to feed on others for its own survival, it can be a useful tool for evaluating our own morality and larger ethical questions.”
Giselle Anatol focused on an entirely different sort of vampire, the soucouyant of the Caribbean, in her 2015 book “The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora” from Rutgers University Press. A professor in the Department of English, Anatol grew up hearing folk tales of the “loogaroo,” or “Old Hag,” who sheds her skin during the night and flies around her community to suck the blood of unwitting victims. Anatol said this soucouyant figure was typically used to encourage children to be obedient but also to fortify certain perceptions about the role of women and older people in the Caribbean and in the U.S. Deep South.
John Tibbetts was goth before goth was cool. The prolific author, former television reporter, movie critic and former professor of film & media studies has just published the fourth in a series of books on gothic horror topics. He began with “The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction in the Media” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and continued through “The Gothic Worlds of Peter Straub” (McFarland, 2016), whom Tibbetts calls “America’s greatest ghost story writer.” Lately, he has focused on two early 20th century British writers of weird fiction. His biography “The Furies of Marjorie Bowen” (McFarland, 2019) was the first about her, followed by his exploration of “The Dark Side of G.K. Chesterton: Gargoyles & Grotesques” (McFarland, 2021). Tibbetts said he hoped that his two edited volumes of “The Marjorie Bowen Reader” will come out later this year. Tibbetts was a friend of the late science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, and he has interviewed many contemporary horror filmmakers, from John Carpenter to Tim Burton. He can speak eloquently on the appeal of the uncanny.
To set up interviews with any of these KU researchers, please contact Rick Hellman, KU News Service public affairs officer, at [email protected] or 913-620-8786.
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