Dracula: Medieval Hero and Modern Vampire
Dracula — the vampire count — has been a popular cultural mainstay portrayed in films, television shows, novels, and comic books for more than a century. The modern fascination with Dracula began in the 1920s and 1930s with the success of plays and movies based on Bram Stoker’s eponymous novel, first published in 1897. The events described in Stoker’s Dracula take place in fin-de-siècle London and Transylvania, and the novel makes only loose historical references to its 15th-century namesake: Vlad III “the Impaler” (1431–c. 1476), prince of Wallachia, now a region of Romania. The massive popularity of the fictional Dracula has generated considerable curiosity about the real-life prince himself, his brutal reign, and his times. This lecture examines the transformations of the historical figure into a modern vampire and the tireless allure of Dracula for creators and audiences.
Alice Isabella Sullivan, associate professor of Medieval art and architecture and director of Graduate Studies in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University. Sullivan is a historian of medieval art, architecture, and visual culture, specializing in the artistic production of Eastern Europe and the Byzantine-Slavic cultural spheres. Her current projects focus on the history, art, and culture of regions of the Balkan Peninsula and the Carpathian Mountains (especially in modern Romania and Ukraine), which developed at the crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic traditions between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from Tufts University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (The Center), Dumbarton Oaks (DO), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Getty Foundation, the Medieval Academy of America (MAA), the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA), the Kress Foundation, the VolkswagenStiftung, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the European Union, ERASMUS-Jean Monnet-Networks, among others.
She has published in peer-reviewed volumes and academic journals, including The Art Bulletin, Speculum, Gesta, Studies in History and Theory of Architecture, Cahiers balkaniques, Études Byzantines et Post-Byzantines, Metropolitan Museum Journal, and others.
This event is organized by the Department of Art & Art History in partnership with the Humanities Center, with sponsorship from the School of Arts & Sciences.