This is a really cool conference idea – holding a conference about Vampires in Transylvania, in Romania! It will be held in Sighisoara, which is the birthplace of Vlad Tepes, the historical figure who is regularly associated with Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula despite having little in common. Here’s a snippet from the call for papers:
Call For Papers: International Vampire Film and Arts Festival – 7-10 June 2018
The third annual International Vampire Film and Arts Festival will take place in Sighisoara in Transylvania, Romania, on June 7th-10th, 2018. To celebrate their popular fiction dual degree collaboration, WRITE TOGETHER–in which students earn an MA studying at Edinburgh Napier University for one year, then transition to a low residency program to earn their MFA from Seton Hill University–faculty from both universities are teaming up to curate this year’s exciting call for papers.
Keynote Speaker: CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN (bestselling author of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – The Watcher’s Guide, Of Saints and Shadows, Ararat, Seize the Night, & more)…
Conference Theme: From Carmilla to Drusilla: Vampires Across Popular Culture
The IVFAF, in association with Seton Hill University and Edinburgh Napier University, calls for papers by scholars interested in presenting their researched essays on vampire literature and film in the academic symposium that runs alongside the festival in Transylvania.
We will divide this year’s academic symposium into two days of programming:
One day will be devoted to situating the vampire as a figure of fascination across popular culture.
One day will focus on the vampires of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe, including its many spin-offs and tie-ins and source materials.
The significance of the “Buffyverse” (which in 2017 celebrated its 20th Anniversary since first airing on television) will be emphasized in this second day. While drawing from an original 1992 horror comedy film, the quirky YA television series developed the characters and the supernatural world of Sunnydale into a long-running series (and a popular spin-off, Angel), generating a cult following that continues to this day in comics, novels, and more.
Both sessions invite papers in genre theory & history, popular fiction, media culture, television theory, adaptation, comic studies, the transformative arts and other areas of film, literary and cultural studies in order to explore and expand the significance of both the vampire, in general, as well as the “Buffyverse,” in popular culture and around the world.
Proposals for single 20-minute papers or pre-constituted panels (of 3 x 20-minute papers) on the conference theme are now welcomed from scholars…
Click through for more details. Here is another call for papers for a conference of related interest:
And finally, see the post on IO9 about the historical natural disaster that inspired the birth of the modern genre of horror writing.
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