Happy New Year

I would like to wish everyone a happy new year!

It is as usual an appropriate time to look back on the previous year and also a bit forward to what is coming up in the future.

For me the conference on vampirism and magia posthuma in Vienna certainly was the highlight. Made possible by Christoph Augustynowicz and Ursula Reber this was an exceptional possibility to meet others interested in the field and learn what they are working on. If you are able to read German, you should make sure to read the papers in the growing digital anthology at Kakanien Revisited!

2009 also saw the popular interest in fictional vampires in constant growth, in particular because of the incredible popularity of Twilight. Unfortunately, this does not reflect in an increasing interest in the aspects of the subject that I have written about here on the blog or that were dealt with at the conference in Vienna.

Abebooks even included vampire books in their list of top sellers in 2009, a first edition of Dracula going for $3.000, while a signed first edition of Twilight was sold for $2.000!

With young people in my own country reading several novels about vampires it has been annoying me that so little is available on the internet on the historical vampire in my native language, so over Christmas I have put together sort of a Danish sister web site to this blog, magiaposthuma.dk, that presents a bit of information on vampire cases, debates etc. from the 16th century and onwards. I am not entirely satisfied with the way it is presented, so I will probably do a bit more work on it.

I know that there are a few other projects that people are working on, but I am unfortunately not able to provide any definite information at the moment. As usual, I will of course post more here, when I know more :-)