Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Strange Case of William Seabrook: Occultist, Surrealist, Pervert and Drunk, and the man who invented the American Zombie’
Event Details
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Thursday, April 14, 2016
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Building: Traill College
Room: Bagnani Hall
Cost: Free
An exploration of the life and times of William Seabrook, Modernist travel writer, journalist, war veteran, spectacular drunk, notorious sado-masochist, cannibal, psychical researcher, occultist, friend of Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Georges Bataille, Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, and the man who claimed responsibility for bringing the zombie back from Haiti and into North American popular culture.
Roger Luckhurst is professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London, and currently Mellon Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of eight books, including The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (1997), Science Fiction: A Cultural History (2005), The Trauma Question (2008), The Mummy’s Curse (2012), and Zombies: A Cultural History (2015). He has published two short studies of The Shining and Alien for the British Film Institute and has edited seven Oxford World’s Classics, including a new edition of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, to be published in 2017. He is currently thinking about writing a book on the particular form of dread induced by corridors, but is not sure if anyone would read it.
All are welcomed to attend!