Dacre Stoker is the great-grand-nephew of Bram Stoker and holds archival material on Bram’s life and writing. He leads heritage tours to Transylvania and other historical sites related to Dracula, and film rights to his latest novel, Dracul (2018) co-authored with JD Barker have recently been purchased by Paramount. He is collaborating with EHU in the 125th anniversary year on an official Dracula tabletop game being produced by Edge Hill researchers and students.
The conference will culminate in a Q&A talk ‘An Evening with Dacre Stoker’, which will also be open to the public. Dacre will speak on Dracula in the archives and reflect from his personal experience on the ongoing relationships between Dracula and tourism, fiction, and film.
Professor Catherine Spooner (Lancaster University) is the author of the award-winning Post- Millennial Gothic (2017). Her work has been central to rethinking the post-millennial vampire as a figure of community via Goth culture, and of happiness and laughter through children’s media and shows like What We Do in the Shadows. Her keynote will start the conference by theorizing the shift from degeneration to regeneration.
Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester Metropolitan University) is Reader in English Literature and Film and a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Met. He will deliver a plenary talk on ‘Dracula’s Grand Tour: The Industrial and Cultural Coordinates of Vampire Cinema in Continental Europe, 1959-1982’, setting the vampire in wider European contexts of social change, national identities and creative industries.
Degeneration to Regeneration 