Sundays with Dracula Archive
This Rosenbach’s Biblioventure series was a virtual conversation about Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and highlighted one chapter per week. It was a paid subscriber series, but we have now released it for everyone to watch free. Edward G. Pettit of the Rosenbach was joined by a set of co-hosts, all of whom have had a long history of reading, collecting, and creating with Stoker’s vampire.
The Rosenbach is the home of Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula, over 100 pages of outlines, early plot ideas, and research notes, compiled by the author over the seven years he developed and wrote the book. Content of these Notes will be featured in the conversations.
Episode Archive
Sherlock Monthly aired live from May 3, 2020 and ended 27 weeks later on November 6, 2020. You can watch all of the episodes on our Sundays with Dracula YouTube playlist.
Facebook Group
You can also view and join discussions in the Sundays with Dracula Facebook group.
Meet the Host
Edward G. Pettit is the Sunstein Senior Manager of Public Programs at the Rosenbach and has been presenter for the weekly Biblioventures series: Sundays with Dracula, Sundays with Frankenstein, Sundays with Jane Eyre, and Austen Mondays: Pride and Prejudice. Pettit has taught many reading courses at the Rosenbach, including Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, and Dickens’ Christmas Books. In a former life, he taught monster books at a Philadelphia University. When not participating in reading marathons, he can usually be found at literary-themed cocktail parties.
Meet the Cohosts
Tucker Christine first picked up the novel Dracula as an act of defiance in the third grade. He hasn’t put it down since. Tucker has been a musician, an audio engineer, an automotive machinist, and a caterer. He currently resides with his wife, daughter, and son in Bensalem where he operates a BBQ catering company with his brother, and leads the instrumental band Pleated Gazelle. Through it all he has been a lifelong reader, fan, and collector of all things Dracula.
Mary Going is a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield, exploring depictions of Jewish characters, myths and legends in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century literature. Along with Lauren Nixon she is co-organiser of Sheffield Gothic and the Reimagining the Gothic project, and is also lead organiser of the Gothic Bible project which hosted a ‘Buffy and the Bible’ conference in 2019 – complete with an evening Buffy singalong. Her publications include a chapter on Jewish vampires in Horror and Religion (UWP, July 2019), an article on witches, Jewish persecution, and sexual violence in Ivanhoe (in Bible and Critical Theory, 2019), and a forthcoming chapter exploring Supernatural and police procedurals. She is also the current Web Officer for the International Gothic Association.
Josh Hitchens is a Philadelphia-based theater director, actor, and playwright. He has written and performed several adaptations of classic horror novels, including Stoker’s Dracula (which he researched at The Rosenbach), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (performed at the Mutter Museum), The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (performed in Clark Park with Curio Theatre Company), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (performed at the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion). His original solo plays include The Confession of Jeffrey Dahmer and the autobiographical Ghost Stories. Josh also writes and narrates the podcast Going Dark Theatre, which explores in-depth tales of hauntings, unsolved mysteries, and horrific history. The podcast is available on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Podbean. joshhitchens.weebly.com
Dr. Lauren Nixon recently acquired her PhD at the University of Sheffield, under the Centre for the History of the Gothic. Her thesis is titled ‘This trade of Death’: war and the figure of the soldier in Gothic fiction, 1764 – 1826, and her research interests are in the representations of masculinity, war, and national identity across the centuries. She is the co-organiser of the postgraduate collective Sheffield Gothic and the Reimagining the Gothic project, which seeks to promote accessible and diverse research in the field of Gothic studies. Alongside co-organiser Mary Going, Lauren recently launched the Sheffield Gothic YouTube channel. Outside of her academic life, Lauren is an avid consumer of a variety of pop culture and will argue, if given the chance, that almost any piece of literature or media could be considered Gothic.
Josh O’Neill is an Eisner and Harvey Award-winning editor, author and curator, as well as the co-founder and publisher of the Philadelphia small presses Locust Moon and Beehive Books, where he explores the unique capacities of graphic art and visual storytelling through art history, creative collaboration and experimental publishing. He is currently in the midst of a headache-inducing attempt to produce a particularly insane and ambitious edition of Dracula.
