With the recent and highly acclaimed AMC adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and AMC’s broader acquisition of Anne Rice’s literary corpus, The Vampire Chronicles have found renewed cultural relevance. As Season 3 enters production, we invite reexaminations of the legacy and transformation of Rice’s vampiric work across media, genres, and generations.
We are seeking scholarly essays that critically engage the many adaptations, appropriations, and afterlives of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles for an edited volume in Palgrave’s Studies in Monstrosity series. We invite contributions from scholars across disciplines. Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:
- AMC’s Interview with the Vampire (2022- ): approaches to race, queerness, temporality, and trauma; departures from and faithfulness to Rice’s canon; cultural impact as seen in fan engagements, rewatch podcasts, and public writing; place within AMC’s Immortal Universe.
- Of particular interest: in addition to the reimagining of Louis and Claudia as Black and expressly queer characters, we are also keen to see critical work that addresses the reimagining of Armand as Brown, as well as the show’s addition of Dubai as a touchstone setting
- Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994): performance, aesthetics, reception, and the film’s place in gothic cinema.
- Michael Rymer’s Queen of the Damned (2002): casting, music, race, cult status.
- Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s Lestat (2006): Broadway reception, musical form, queer gothic sensibilities, status as commercial and critical failure.
- Adaptations and appropriations in other media: comics/graphic novels, theater, ballet, visual art, body art, etc.
- Comparative interpretations: Rice’s vampires (in any iteration) in dialogue with other vampire narratives (e.g., Sinners, Suicide by Sunlight, The Originals, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Only Lovers Left Alive, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, etc.); vampires and authors that inspired Rice (e.g., Blacula, Carmilla, Dracula’s Daughter, Byron, Polidori, Stoker, etc.)
- Tourism and cultural geographies: vampire tours in New Orleans and beyond, the commodification of Rice’s legacy, intersections of fiction, space, and local/global histories.
- Fandom and community: fan fiction, online forums, cosplay cultures, conventions, and the evolving role of fan labor in sustaining Rice’s mythos.
- Vampire Balls and immersive fan events: performance, ritual, identity play, and the gothic carnivalesque.
- Sexuality, gender, race,colonial histories and legacies, queer and trans embodiments, illness and disease, disability, neurodivergence, youth and age/ageing, world religions/religious feeling, andother key thematic preoccupations in Rice’s fiction and/or its adaptations.
- Adaptation as translation, revision, or resistance to Rice’s politics or aesthetics.
Submission Guidelines
Abstracts of 300 words due: October 15, 2025
Complete first draft (7,000–9,000 words, MLA style) due: May 30, 2026
Revised final draft due: October 31, 2026
Submit abstracts to: Deanna Koretsky ([email protected]) and Alex Milsom ([email protected]). Please include a short bio (50–100 words) with your abstract.