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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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John Edgar BrowningBrittain Fellow John Edgar Browning, an internationally recognized vampire and horror scholar, was cited on Examiner.com discussing his ethnographic research into modern-day real life vampire communities.
When thinking of real life vampires, most picture moody teens dressed in black clothing, copying what they’ve seen on television. "What real vampirism is not, however, is the sole adoption of Gothic dress and prosthetic fangs for aesthetic purposes, as though real vampirism were merely a practice or fad that one might adopt one day and discard the next,” writes John Edgar Browning.
Browning's paper, titled The Real Vampires of New Orleans and Buffalo: A Research Note Towards Comparative Ethnography, published to Palgrave Communications in March of 2015, serves as an elaboration of his ethnographic work and seeks to raise careful discussion of the little-explored identity and phenomenon of “real vampirism”. His work spans five years and two cities, exploring what Browning terms “defiant culture”, through which vampire self-identification is able to achieve a measure of empowerment by resisting “normalcy” while critiquing and challenging the power structures that re/produce it.
