Keynote Speakers 2022
Dacre Stoker
Dacre Stoker is the great grand-nephew of Bram Stoker and the international best-selling co-author of Dracula the Un-Dead (2009), the Stoker family endorsed sequel to Dracula. Dacre is also the co-editor (with Elizabeth Miller) of The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker: The Dublin Years (2012). Released in October of 2018, Dracul, a prequel to Dracula, co-authored with JD Barker, was the UK’s # 1 Bestselling Hardcover Novel in Horror and Supernatural in 2018, and a top 5 finalist by the Horror Writers Association for the Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a Novel. Film rights for Dracul have been optioned by Paramount Studios.
Hans C. de Roos
Hans Corneel de Roos studied Political & Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam and the Free
University, Berlin; graduated cum laude in 1975. He made a career in Public Administration and in the
financial field; his true passions, however, were (and are) Art, Art History and Photography. He got
involved in Dracula Studies in 2010 while preparing a photo-illustrated Dracula edition. Since then, he
has made a series of groundbreaking discoveries about the true locations of Castle Dracula, the
Scholomance and Carfax, the lifetime identity of Count Dracula, the Icelandic and Swedish versions
and the first US serialization of Dracula. De Roos is the translator/editor of Powers of Darkness (New
York: Overlook, 2017), and contributed to Dracula–An International Perspective (ed. Marius Crișan,
Palgrave, 2017). He was the Acting Editor of Letter from Castle Dracula, the bulletin of the
Transylvanian Society of Dracula (2013-2016) and is the author of numerous articles about Stoker’s
novel. He received the Research Award from the Transylvanian Society of Dracula and the Lord
Ruthven Special Award 2018. He is the initiator of the Fourth World Dracula Congress in Dublin
(2016) and the “Children of the Night” International Dracula Conference series. In 2021, he won the
Golden Bat Award for his video documentary about Philippine vampires.
Enrique A. Palafox
Enrique A Palafox is a Doctor in Modern Literature & a Creative Designer based in Mexico City.
He has experience working as a designer in Entertainment and as Part-time Lecturer.
He also has a Master's degree in Communications and He is currently working on the adaptation of Dracula by Bram Stoker into media content & Merchandising items.
Laura Loguercio Cánepa
Laura Loguercio Cánepa is PhD in Multimedia (Unicamp, Brazil, 2008). She has published several works on Brazilian horror films, including “Erotic Brazilian Movies of Female Killers” (in A Panorama of Brazilan Porn, BALTAR, 2018); “José Mojica Marins versus Coffin Joe: auteurism and stardom in Brazilian cinema” (in Stars and Stardom in Brazilian Cinema, BERGFELDER; SHAW; VIEIRA, 2017); “Panorama histórico del horror en el cine brasileño (in Horrofílmico - Aproximaciones al cine de terror en Latinoamérica y el Caribe, DÍAZ-ZAMBRANA; TOME, 2012).
Simon Bacon
Simon Bacon is a writer and film critic based in Poznań, Poland. He has written and edited 20+ books on various subjects including Gothic: A Reader (2018), Horror: A Companion (2019), Transmedia Vampires (2021), Spoofing the Vampire (2022) and Nosferatu in the 21st Century (2022), 1000 Vampires on Screen (2023), The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire (forthcoming), and co-edited Growing Up with Vampires (2019 with Katarzyna Bronk). He has also published a series of books on vampires in popular culture: Becoming Vampire (2016), Dracula as Absolute Other (2019), Eco-Vampires (2020), Vampires From Another World (2021), and is working on the next Unhallowed Ground: Imminent Terror and the Specter of the Vampire on Screen.
Updates on new and forthcoming projects can be found at his website: https://simonjbacon.wordpress.com/about/ or Facebook page: Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/Vampires-Vampires-Everywhere-102814468507429/. or Twitter @baconetti, or Amazon author page:https://www.amazon.com/Simon-Bacon/e/B07MWB5FVK?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1658399832&sr=1-1
Yuri Garcia
Yuri Garcia is a Professor of the Postgraduate Program in Communication at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (PPGCom-UERJ) and at the graduate courses of Estácio de Sá University (UNESA).
Doctor and Master in Social Communication in the Communcation Post-Graduate Program at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). Post-Doctoral Researcher at Universidade Anhembi Morumbi with research on the reconfigurations of the vampire image in contemporary cinema since 2022. Held a Post-Doctoral internship at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) with research on Transpositions of Comics in Cinema (2019-2020). Coordinator of the research group "POPMID: Reflections on Gender² and Trends in Media Productions". Author of the book "Drácula: o vampiro camaleônico" (2014), conducts research on Cinematographic Genres (especially Horror) and cinematographic transpositions of literary works and comics.
Leslie S. Klinger
Leslie S. Klinger is the editor of the highly-acclaimed New Annotated Dracula, New Annotated Frankenstein, and the two-volume New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft as well as the anthologies In the Shadow of Dracula and In the Shadow of Edgar Allen Poe, featuring 19th- century supernatural fiction. Together with Lisa Morton, he’s also edited the anthologies Ghost Stories Weird Women, Weird Women II, and Haunted Tales, all with extensive selections of Victorian horror. He co-edited (with Eric Guignard) the HWA’s Haunted Library of Horror Classics. His latest book, out October 15 from Mysterious Press, is New Annotated Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Marius-Mircea Crișan
Dr Habil Marius-Mircea Crișan (PhD 2008 University of Turin, Italy) is Associate Professor at the Teacher Training Dept., West University of Timișoara. He is the editor of Dracula: An International Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature 2017), coordinator of the special issue of Biblioteca Nova Bulletin "Speculative Fiction and the Frontiers of the Possible" (2019), author of The Birth of the Dracula Myth: Bram Stoker’s Transylvania (2013) and The Impact of a Myth: Dracula and the Fictional Representation of the Romanian Space (2013), and co-editor of the volume Beliefs and Behaviours in Education and Culture: Cultural Determinants and Education (2017). He was the manager of the research project The impact of a Myth: Dracula and the Image of Romania in British and American Literatures (2011-2013). For more information, see: http://www.themythoftransylvania.ro/
John Browning
John Edgar Browning (Ph.D., SUNY-Buffalo), Professor of Liberal Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design, has appeared as an expert guest on or consulted for such documentary programs as National Geographic's Taboo USA (2013), Discovery Channel’s William Shatner’s Weird or What? (2010), AMC’s Eli Roth’s History of Horror (2018), History Channel’s The UnXplained (2020), Disney+’s The World According to Jeff Goldblum (2021), and Netflix, as well as numerous radio programs. He has contracted or published 20 academic and popular trade books and at least 100 articles, chapters, and reviews on subjects that cluster around Dracula, vampires, zombies, horror, and the Gothic, including: The Forgotten Writings of Bram Stoker (Palgrave, 2012) and the forthcoming Dracula—An Anthology: Critical Reviews and Reactions, 1897–1920 (Edinburgh University Press), as well as critical editions of Montague Summers’s The Vampire: His Kith and Kin and The Vampire in Europe (Apocryphile Press, 2011, 2014); with Caroline Joan S. Picart, he co-edited as well Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology (Palgrave, 2012) and co-wrote Dracula in Visual Media (McFarland, 2010); with David R. Castillo, David Schmid, and David A. Reilly, he co-wrote Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics (Palgrave Pivot, 2016); and, with Darren Elliott-Smith, co-edited New Queer Horror Film and Television (Horror Studies) (University of Wales Press, 2020). He is also co-editor of the second Norton Critical Edition of Dracula (2021) with David J. Skal.