Dracula Lunchtime Bites

Halloween in Transylvania, excitement and disappointment

Transylvania! The word conjures up images of somewhere remote, magical and slightly scary. This talk looks at our ideas of Transylvania as a place of myth and magic – and also looks at how the reality of Transylvania doesn’t always live up to expectations.

Dracula Lunchtime Bites are a series of general online talks delivered by specialists in Dracula, the Gothic and horror. The series is 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.

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.

The first talk is by Dr Duncan Light, who is also organising all of the talks. He is a co-investigator on the Dracula Returns to Derby research project, which is led by the University of Derby.

Duncan Light joined Bournemouth University in 2014 and is Principal Academic in tourism management at Bournemouth University Business School. By background he is a human geographer. All his teaching and research draws out the relationships between tourism, places and spaces. Much of his research focuses on Romania, a country he has visited regularly since 1995.

He is interested in the cultural politics of tourism. His recent research has focused on 'Dracula tourism' in Romania. Dracula presents Romania with a unique dilemma: on one hand it can generate much needed foreign currency through tourism, but on the other hand it fundamentally collides with Romania's sense of its own political and cultural identity. His book 'The Dracula Dilemma: Tourism, Identity and the State in Romania' (Routledge, 2016) explores how Romania has negotiated this dilemma over the past 40 years (in both communist and post-communist contexts).

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 27 November, 12.30–13.00
'Bram Stoker’s vampire'
Dr Sam George, University of Hertfordshire

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). You can book here. Details of how to join the talk will be emailed to you during the morning of 27 November.

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). You can book here. 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). You can book here. 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
Speaker to be confirmed

Wed 26 March, 12.30–13.00
Speaker to be confirmed

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). You can book here. 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.