Libraries

Zombies are Everywhere!

Photo of a graveyard with the text Zombies!

On Monday, October 31 at 12:10 pm in the Leslie F. Malpass Library, room 180, University Libraries will be providing a Halloween treat, a talk about zombies. Why zombies? Zombies are everywhere in American culture at the moment: movies, television, novels, even serious novels such as Colson Whitehead's recently published and widely reviewed Zone One. The zombie has seized the zeitgeist. Yet, zombies are nothing new in American culture as Melissa Wangall, a Masters candidate in English, will demonstrate when she gives us a guided historical tour entitled, "Zombie Culture: Representations of the Zombie Throughout American History."

Wangall will be discussing the roots of zombie culture, from its origin in Haiti, becoming immortalized in American culture in the movie White Zombie, to the varying representations of the zombie as American culture has shifted, from the infamous shambling zombies of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, to the rages of 28 Days Later, to the post-human new millennial zombie: zombies with the ability to think, as presented in the film Zombies Anonymous.

Melissa Wangall is an English Graduate student at Western Illinois University whose thesis work focuses on the role of the female body as represented in the zombie genre. Wangall received her B.A. in English in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL. Questions? Contact Tammy Sayles at tj-sayles@wiu.edu.