Sam George- The Folkloric Vampire

Sam George is Associate Professor in Research and the Convenor of the popular Open Graves, Open MindsProject at the University of Hertfordshire. She publishes on botany alongside the gothic, unearthing depictions of the vampire and the undead in literature, art, and other media, embracing werewolves (and representations of wolves and wild children), dark fairies, and other supernatural beings and their worlds. Her new research is specifically focussed on the intersection between folklore and the gothic, it ranges from British werewolves  to Japanese mermaids. She is currently completing a monograph on the folklore of Shadows and a book on Gothic Fairies: A History for Bloomsbury.

Following OGOM’s international conference on vampires in 2010, Sam developed the first postgraduate module on vampire studies in the UK, exciting the interest of the national and international press. She is now a leading spokesperson for the literary vampire. Her interviews have appeared in newspapers from The Guardianand The Independent to the Sydney Morning Herald, The South China Post, and the Wall Street Journal. She’s a regular contributor to The Conversation, amassing 261,802 reads for her lively and unusual articles on vampires, werewolves and fairies.

Her work with OGOM has led to a number of co-edited publications with Dr Bill Hughes: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day (2012); In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves and Wild Children (2020); The Legacy of John William Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny (2022) and the forthcoming collection ‘Ill met by moonlight’: Gothic Encounters with Enchantment and the Faerie Realm in Literature and Culture (forthcoming). Sam also co-edited the first ever issue of Gothic Studieson ‘Vampires’ with Bill Hughes in 2013 (15.1) and ‘Werewolves’ in 2019 (21.1).