We’d like to wish all our followers a happy and successful 2024. We were thrilled this month to see the book jacket for our latest OGOM publication The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny, which is out later in the year. Here’s a preview:
I’m excited to reveal too, that I will be working with St Pancras Old Church on a brochure and Gothic tour for the public which includes Polidori’s disturbed final resting place in the Churchyard. We will be launching this to tie in with the book. The mystery of Polidori’s supposed suicide and missing headstone is something I spoke about on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and it features in the afterword to the book. Sir Chris Frayling has written the preface and we hope that the book will go some way to redeeming ‘Poor Polidori’. It explores the genesis of Polidori’s vampire and tracks his bloodsucking progeny across the centuries and maps his disquieting legacy from the melodramatic vampire theatricals in the 1820s, through further Gothic fictions and horror films, to twenty-first-century paranormal romance. You can read more about the book and link to the table of contents on our publication pages here.
It is looking to be an exciting year for OGOM. We are currently completing our fairy collection and also our editorship of The Cambridge Companion to the Vampire. We also have 2 new funded PhD students who we’ll introduce in full shortly via updated contact pages. Our BAME scholarship student Shabnam is also active with regards to supporting the project. Suffice to say, we are looking forward to working with them and you’ll be able to read about their research in progress on the blog. At present, their topics are as follows:
- Jane Gill: ‘The Monstrous Feminine: A Female Gothic Perspective on the Lamia and Soucoyant Archetypes in Literature, C. 1820-2000’
- Harley Tillotson: ‘Ecology in YA Fairy Fiction: Eco-Gothic Approaches to Contemporary Environmental Issues’
- Shabnam Ahsan: ‘From Coloniality to Postcoloniality in British Fairy tales: 1880-present’
We’d like to mention too that we are open to contributions for feature articles or reviews for the OGOM blog if you’d like to contact us. We have guidelines and also a books received list for reviews. For a wonderful example of the type of material we are looking for, see Stacey Abbot’s review of the Nosferatu at 100 exhibition.
Finally, a reminder that our book In the Company of Wolves is out in paperback and we couldn’t be prouder!! If you are an academic, please consider ordering it for your library or adopting it onto your Gothic modules. We’d love it to be widely read by students of the Gothic.
And Happy New Year to all of you too! Thank you.
Thanks, Daryl!!