The academic landscape is changing, you see, and what constitutes “fine art” and “canonical literature” is shifting as well-there is now a place for popular culture in the academy.
Susan White, recognized how cinema is just another form of literature, and they wholeheartedly endorsed my proposal. Jerrold Hogle and my eventual dissertation director Dr. Already having a scholarly publication on the subject certainly helped me and my cause, but I also made a strong case about the cultural and critical significance of the subgenre to American culture. My interest in zombie cinema had continued to grow, and with a few academic conferences under my belt, I decided to pitch the idea of a zombie-themed dissertation to the graduate director, Meg Lota Brown. A couple of years later, my first article, “Raising the Dead: Unearthing the Nonliterary Origins of Zombie Cinema” appeared in the Journal of Popular Film and Television (33.4).Īt about the same time, I was entering the University of Arizona as a graduate student in the English program. This conversation lead me to research Haitian folklore and voodoo, to view early zombie movies like White Zombie (Halperin, 1932), and to examine Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968) with a much more critical eye.
At the time, almost no literary zombie narratives existed, and I started to wonder where the damn subgenre came from in the first place. We were trying to come up with other thematic tropes and scenes that only really exist on the screen, for whatever practical or aesthetic reason. Todd Petersen, another English professor at Southern Utah University, and we were riffing on an Eddie Izzard bit about how car chases don’t appear in books. Kyle Bishop: No problem-I always appreciate the opportunity to talk about my research! My academic interest in zombie movies began about six or seven years ago. Can you tell me how you developed the personal interest in this subject matter, and how you convinced your academic institution to support this kind of dissertation research? I know that your research in zombies began with your PhD dissertation work. TheoFantastique: Kyle, thanks for squeezing an interview in with your busy teaching schedule. Bishop teaches at Southern Utah University and carved out some space to discuss his book. This book provides a fascinating exploration of the zombie in culture, from its early expressions in literature and horror films to more recent expressions in the zombie explosion. I then came across an article on his research in The University of Arizona’s UA News, “The Zombie: A New Monster for a a New World.” I soon learned thereafter that Bishop had modified his PhD work for the book American Zombie Gothic (McFarland, 2010). I first became aware of Kyle Bishop and his work on zombies in film and culture for his PhD while researching the surge in academic work on horror.
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