Dracula

Bram Stoker (1847-1912), an Irish novelist and short story writer, was known during his lifetime as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned, but is best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. Nina Auerbach is John Welsh Centennial Professor of History and Literature and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction; Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth; Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts; Ellen Terry, Player in Her Time; Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians; and Our Vampires, Our Selves. She is co-editor, with U. C. Knoepflmacher, of Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers. David J. Skal was one of the world’s preeminent authorities on Bram Stoker, Dracula, and monsters in popular culture. His book Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (Norton, 1990) was hailed as “the ultimate book on Dracula” by Newsweek; The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (Norton, 1993) has had multiple translations and is widely considered the standard historical and critical survey. As a filmmaker, he wrote, produced, and directed a dozen DVD and Blu-ray documentaries on Universal’s classic horror and science fiction films, as well as a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the Academy Award–winning film Gods and Monsters. Skal guest-lectured extensively at major colleges, universities, and cultural organizations in North America and Europe, with speaking engagements at sites such as the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Musée du Louvre. He additionally taught courses based on his books at the University of Victoria and Trinity College Dublin, where he was also appointed a Long Room Hub Visiting Research Fellow for Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker (Liveright, 2016), chosen by the Mystery Writers of America as a 2017 Edgar Award finalist for biography and criticism. His official website was monstershow.net.