Vampires and Zombies: Transnational Transformations

Saw this and just had to re-post for the sharper minds that walk among us.

A call for proposals for an exciting anthology has crossed our transom:

Vampires and Zombies: Transnational Transformations (working title)

Editors: Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (Heidelberg University, Germany), Timothy Fox (National Yilan University, Taiwan), and Monika Mueller (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

The undead are very much alive in the contemporary cultural imagination. Vampires and zombies have garnered a generous amount of attention in print media, cinema, and on television. The vampire, with its roots in medieval European folklore, and the zombie, with its origins in Afro-Caribbean voodoo mythology, find multiple transformations in global culture and continue to function as monstrous representatives of zeitgeist.

A publisher has expressed interest in a volume examining the phenomenon of vampires and zombies as transnational cultural icons. Contributors are invited to submit papers on aspects of zombies and vampires as they relate to texts and media across cultural boundaries. Approaches and topics that papers may address, but in no way are limited to:

• Readings of individual texts, authors, and media
• Histories and anthropologies of the zombie and the vampire
• Genre, gender and sexuality, class, and race/ethnic interpretations
• Comparative, transnational, and translingual analyses (traveling tropes, cultural diffusion, mapping translations)
• Globalizations and cultural contexts (economies of power, colonialism, post-colonialism)
• Terrorism, modern warfare
• Migrations, creolizations, hybridizations, the cyber-undead
• Xenophobia: the Other, the alien, the invader, the intruder
• Horror, fear, anxiety, paranoia
• Encounters with Thanatos
• Tainted blood, disease, pandemic, viruses and other biological agents of infection
• Formation of inhuman Communities
• The postmodern, the posthuman, apocalypse and post-apocalypse
• The pop culture industry and consumption (series and sequels, slapstick, satire, the “mockumentary”)
• Video gaming and clubbing
• Graphic novels and comic books
• Self-publishing technologies (digital books, print on demand), the Internet (YouTube, social networks, blogs, e-zines)
• Interviews with authors or filmmakers

Please submit a 500-word abstract and a CV, including contact information, to: (vampzomb at mesea.org)

Deadline: March 15, 2010.

To facilitate procedures, we request that in the Subject space of the email you write: Abstract-[contributor’s name].

The editors will select from among the submitted abstracts according to suitability for the project and contact submitters by April 1. Successful abstract submitters will be requested to submit a full paper (approx. 7,000 words) by August 1.

via: infocult