RR Podcast E37 Free Content Dr. John E. Browning: Real Vampirism

*This is the Free Content version of my interview with Dr. John E. Browning. To access the entire episode, please consider becoming a Tier 1 ‘Gates of Argonath’ member, or you can purchase this episode for a one-time fee. 


My guest this month is Dr. John E. Browning. 

A professor in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area, John Edgar Browning, Ph.D. has contracted or published 20 academic and popular trade books as well as over 100 shorter works on subjects that cluster around cultural studies, critical media literacy, Dracula, vampires, monstrosity, and horror. Included among his work in film and media studies is his decade-and-a-half-long ethnographic fieldwork with the human or real vampire subculture (a topic in which there are perhaps five scholars worldwide). In addition to academic venues, Browning has published on the real vampire subculture in public forums such as The Atlantic (2015) and Discover Magazine (2015 and 2018), and his unique expertise in this area has helped facilitate several public appearances as a guest scholar on, or service as a consultant for, over two dozen television and streaming networks, professional podcasts, and radio programs, including Discovery channel, National Geographic, Animal Planet, AMC Visionaries: Eli Roth’s History of Horror, History channel, Disney+, Netflix, Discover Magazine’s “It’s Only Science” podcast, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, NPR, The Howard Stern Show network, BBC Radio, RTÉ—Ireland’s National Television and Radio Broadcaster, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Georgia Public Broadcasting, and SLATE among others. 

In this interview, John and I discuss his research into the Real Vampire Community. He talks about his motivation to begin looking into this subculture, as well as what he’s learned over the years. As this topic somewhat overlaps with my own research into the Otherkin community, I take the opportunity to ‘compare notes’ so to speak, and ask questions to gain more clarity on this group. 

John also discusses to what degree contemporary expressions of the vampire in popular culture have influenced the real vampire community, and how his research has contributed to changing perceptions of this subculture. He talks about his term ‘defiant culture’ as it relates to people who have been labeled ‘Other’ or ‘deviant’ and also mentions how his research has helped forensic professionals that deal with crimes that seem, on the surface, to involve people who label themselves ‘vampires’. 

We also touch upon the Temple of the Vampire, a group that is viewed as a religious organization, and how this group relates to the larger vampire community in the US. 

PROGRAM NOTES

John Edgar Browning - Savannah College of Art and Design

Foreword to The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire (ed. Simon Bacon)

"The real vampires of New Orleans and Buffalo: a research note towards comparative ethnography"

"Life Among the Vampires" (THE ATLANTIC, October 31, 2015)

Vampire Fictions and the Conflation of Violent Criminality with Real Vampirism: A Practical Overview

John Edgar Browning - Wikipedia

Amazon.com: Dracula: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions): 9780393679205: Stoker, Bram, Skal, David J., Browning, John Edgar: Books
Dr. John Edgar Browning (@jedgarbrowning) • Instagram photos and videos


All Music and Editing: Daniel P. Shea
End Production: Stephanie Shea