In 1739, a sensational article was published in the usually conservative St Petersburg Times – “On The Vampires.” But was this such a shocking topic for the 18th century European press?
In fact vampires had been on the minds of European intellectuals for much of the 1730s. The Habsburgs, investigating potential epidemics in the Balkans, also encountered peasant belief in the contagious undead. Scientists and theologians alike quickly took up the issue of vampires, as the living dead threatened to upend their worldviews. A pan-European debate ensued, as scholars in Britain, France, the German Lands, and Sweden discussed the issue in salons and Academies of Science and argued their case in journal articles and books. Little has been written about Russia’s role in those debates. Yet the adoption of literacy, changing attitudes towards the dead, and the creation of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, all came together so that in the 1730s Russia was an ideal location to take on the most Enlightened of subjects, that of the vampires.
This hybrid event is co-sponsored by the Centre for European Studies, Eurasia Research Cluster, UBC Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies, and UBC Medieval Studies Program. Register for the Zoom link below.
Bio
Clare Griffin is an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington and the author of Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia, which was published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2022. She is currently working on her second monograph, which explores the embodied experiences of soldiers in the context of Russian colonialism from the seventeenth century to the present day. She has published in a range of venues, from the pop culture site Pajiba to literary outlets like Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, academic blogs including All of Us: The Disability History Association Blog, as well as academic journals such as Social History of Medicine and Chronotopos – A Journal of Translation History.
