Dracula Lunchtime Bites

Bram Stoker’s vampire

Bram Stoker spent seven years researching his novel Dracula. In this talk, Dr Sam George draws on the research notes that Stoker made on the vampire figure and probes into some of his more folkloric sources. It explores the many attributes of the Count as vampire and explains why Dracula casts no reflection in a mirror. This talk is free, but you need to book in advance (it takes less than a minute).

Details of how to join the talk will be emailed to you during the morning of 27 November.

This talk is free, but you need to book in advance (it takes less than a minute).

About the speaker

All of the speakers in the series are external to the University of Derby.

This talk is by Dr Sam George, University of Hertfordshire.

Book your place

You can book your place here www.ticketsource.co.uk/draculalunchtimebites. You will be sent a link after you have booked.

Future speakers

Wed 11 December, 12.30–13.00
'Séance Spectres: Spiritualism and the Victorian Ghost Story'
Dr Emily Vincent, University of Birmingham

Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Florence Marryat were all Victorian authors who took literary inspiration from the ghostly world of séances. In this Lunchtime Bites talk, Dr Emily Vincent reveals the connections between the popular Victorian movement of Spiritualism – which involved contacting spirits of the dead via séances – and nineteenth-century ghost stories which featured mystifying mediums and summoned spectres.
This talk is free, but you need to book in advance (it takes less than a minute). Details of how to join the talk will be emailed to you during the morning of 11 December.

Wed 29 January, 12.30–13.00
'Music and the Gothic: 1764-1820'
Dr Emma McEvoy, University of Westminster

Has the music of Gothic novels and plays always been scary and unsettling? If not, what did it sound like and how did it affect its listeners? Dr Emma McEvoy considers some of the surprising music of early Gothic literature and explores the musical legacy of melodrama.
This talk is free, but you need to book in advance (it takes less than a minute). Details of how to join the talk will be emailed to you during the morning of 29 January.

Wed 26 February, 12.30–13.00
'What have Romanians made of Dracula?'
Dr Anca-Simina Martin, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is not well known in Romania. In this talk Dr Anca Martin examines the reception of the novel in Romania, focusing on journalists’ reactions to its first three translations: the previously lost interwar edition, now rediscovered and successfully sold at Bran Castle; the 1990 version (suppressed during the communist period); and its 1992 reissue, which coincided with the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

This talk is free, but you need to book in advance (it takes less than a minute). Details of how to join the talk will be emailed to you during the morning of 26 February.

Wed 26 March, 12.30–13.00
‘Dracula’s Cape and a Cloaked Novel’
Dr Anna Burton, University of Derby

It was in the stage adaptation (first performed in Derby in 1924) of Bram Stoker’s Dracula wherein the Count’s characteristic cape first appeared to shroud and define the vampire. Taking inspiration from this cloaked context, Dr Anna Burton will return to the 1897 novel to talk about how the original text is enveloped in dark shadows and fabrics, and in turn, it will consider how these trappings have contributed to our cultural understanding of Stoker’s work.

This talk is free, but you need to book in advance (it takes less than a minute). Details of how to join the talk will be emailed to you during the morning of 26 March.

Wed 30 April, 12.30–13.00
'The blood is the life’: The Role of Blood in Bram Stoker’s Dracula'
Dr Maddy Potter, University of Edinburgh

‘The blood is the life’ shouts Renfield in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In its Biblical echoes, it intimates the promise of eternal life – and the vampire’s perverse appropriation of that very promise. But Renfield’s exclamation is also strikingly literal, indeed medical. In this talk, Dr Maddy Potter will explore the role and implications of blood in Dracula and how it brings together the natural and the supernatural in the novel.
This talk is free, but you need to book in advance (it takes less than a minute). Details of how to join the talk will be emailed to you during the morning of 30 April.

About these events

These events are part of Dracula Returns to Derby, an AHRC-funded research project led by the University of Derby in partnership with Derby Museums, Derby Theatre, Bournemouth University and Sheffield Hallam University. A series of public workshops and events connect the city with the world’s most famous vampire. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram.