Notes on Contributors
Editors
U. Melissa Anyiwo
is a Professor of Politics & History and Coordinator of African American Studies at Curry College in Massachusetts with a relentless obsession for all things dark and monstrous. A transplanted Nigerian-British citizen whose dissertation focused on stereotypical images of African American women—“Mammy” and “Jezebel”—from the sixteenth century to the present, she regularly writes and presents on racial and gender archetypes including From the Kitchen to the White House: Michelle Obama & the Redemption of Black Womanhood, and “That’s Not What I Signed Up For”: Teaching Millennial’s about Difference through First-Year Learning Communities” in Outside/In in Teaching Race & Anti-Racism in Contemporary America: Adding Subtext to Colorblindness (2013).
Anyiwo’s passion for the vampire as racial stereotype has yielded multiple presentations including “Bad Girls? The Female Vampire on Film & Television,” and “Selene and the Redeeming of the Female Vampire in the Underworld Series,” “Not Cinderella but Prince Charming” The Destruction of Masculinity in Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, and “The True Monstrosity of Monsters: the Hidden Solution to Otherness in True Blood and Blade Trinity.” Her published work includes “Using Vampires to Explore Diversity and Alienation in a College Classroom” (2014) and the edited collections Buffy Conquers the Academy (2013), Race in the Vampire Narrative (2015), and Gender in the Vampire Narrative (2016).
Finally, leaving no doubt that she’s a vampirologist, Anyiwo was featured in the Warner Brothers documentary “Lestat, Louis, and the Vampire Phenomenon” for the Interview with the Vampire 20th Anniversary Edition (2014) and is the current cochair of the Vampire Studies Area at the National Popular Cultures and American Cultures Association.
Amanda Jo Hobson
is the Assistant Dean of Students and Director at the Women’s Resource Centre at Indiana State University. In her role as a student affairs administrator, her work focuses on issues of social justice and equity in higher education, and she regularly presents about a wide-range of diversity issues, including gender justice, bystander intervention, and sexual violence. Her doctoral work at Ohio University’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts centers on issues of intersectionality of identity in feminist genre film with a specific emphasis on horror films and pornography. Amanda presents on the construction and portrayal of gender, sexuality, and race within contemporary popular culture and art, such as “Gender Blending and Genre Bending in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series,” “Apocalyptic Vampires,” and Vampiric Icons: Visions of Vampires from Dirty to Debonair in Less than 200 Years. Additionally, she regularly uses popular culture to educate about social justice, including presentations on “Horror Films as Social Commentary,” “Feminist Horror Films,” and “Monstrosity in Popular Culture.” She has been invited to deliver lectures on the topic of vampires in popular culture, including a talk at BalletMet of Columbus, Ohio, for their production of Dracula.
Her published work includes “‘We Don’t Do History’: Constructing Masculinity in a World of Blood” in Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and “Brothers Under Covers: Race and the Paranormal Romance Novel” in Race in the Vampire Narrative (Sense Publishers, 2015). She is the co-editor with U. Melissa Anyiwo of Gender in the Vampire Narrative (Sense Publishers, 2016). Amanda can be found most days reading endless novels, watching horror movies, and hanging out with her adorable fifteen-year old furry kid, Beaker.
Contributors
Candace Benefiel
was an associate professor and humanities librarian at Texas A&M University for many years. She had a Master of Library Science from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master of English from West Texas State University and was also a doctoral candidate at Texas A&M with a dissertation in progress on the vampire in literature at the time of her death in August 2017. Candace was a well-known scholar on the popular vampire and a mainstay in the Vampire Studies Area for the Popular Culture Association’s national conference. Her scholarship included a plethora of articles in the Journal of Popular Culture, College and Research Libraries, and many others. Her book, Reading Laurell K. Hamilton (ABC-Clio, 2011) is a valuable resource in the fields of vampire and urban fantasy studies.
Cait Coker
is a doctoral candidate at Texas A&M University. Her background is in genre history, fandom and fan studies, and the history of women’s writing and publishing. Her articles have appeared in TXT Magazine, Transformative Works and Cultures, Journal of Fandom Studies, and Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction
Ana G. Gal
Ph.D., is an English instructor at the University of Memphis. Her research focuses on the Gothic tradition, with particular emphasis on how Western representations of monstrous bodies have evolved in literature, film, television, and graphic novels since the nineteenth century. Her most recent published work includes “Good Bad Boys and the Women who Love Them: Romantic Triangulation and the Ideal of Conformist Assimilation in The Vampire Diaries and True Blood” in Hero or Villain?: Essays on Dark Protagonists of Television (McFarland, 2017) and “Performative Femininity and Female Invalidism in John Keats’s ‘La belle dame sans merci’ and S.T. Coleridge’s Christabel” in Gender in the Vampire Narrative (Sense Publishers, 2016). She is currently researching how contemporary vampire television shows, under the guise of feminism and progressivism, work toward legitimizing the commodification of female bodies and sexual violence against women.
Jenna Guitar
is a PhD candidate at the University of Rhode Island in the English department where she also teaches courses in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her research interests include Gothic literature, fandom studies, popular culture, and Queer theory. She has previously published the chapter “Glee Goes Gaga: Queering Concepts of High School Identity Formation” in the edited collection, Glee and New Directions for Social Change (Sense, 2015).
Lauren Rocha
is the First-Year Writing Coordinator and a professor in the English Department at Merrimack College. She is fascinated by beauty culture, monsters, and the Gothic. Her recent publication “That Geek Look: Beauty and the Female Geek Body” in Age of the Geek: Depictions of Nerds and Geeks in Popular Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores beauty culture and the female body in the popular television series The Big Bang Theory, Criminal Minds, and Doctor Who. Her other publications include “Angel in the House, Devil in the City: Explorations of Gender in Dracula and Penny Dreadful,” “Beneath the Surface: The Masculine Self and Body in Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’,” and “Wife, Mother, Vampire: The Female Role in the Twilight Series.”
Sarah A. Smith
M.S., M.B.A., is an Online Learning Manager for Partner in Publishing (PIP). With over 14 years of experience in developing and implementing a wide array of instructional technology training and professional development opportunities at all levels of expertise, focused on facilitating student learning and integrating technology with curriculum. Inspired by her love of the visual image, Sarah earned a BA in Graphic/Information Design from and a Master’s in Education Technology at Central Connecticut State University and a Master’s in Business Administration from Curry College. Finding a quiet retreat in Quincy, Massachusetts, Sarah challenged her superhero persona by purchasing a fixer upper. Now, she works on the landscape while her puppy Frankie chases squirrels. Sarah is a console gamer and enjoys co-op games on her Xbox, and of course, all things Wonder Woman.