The Year's Work at the Zombie Research Center

They have stalked the horizons of our culture, wreaked havoc on moribund concepts of dead and not dead, threatened our sense of identity, and endangered our personal safety. Now zombies have emerged from the lurking shadows of society's fringes to wander the sacred halls of the academy, feasting on tender minds and hurling rot across our intellectual landscape. It is time to unite in common cause, to shore up defenses, firm up critical and analytical resources, and fortify crumbling lines of inquiry. Responding to this call, Brain Workers from the Zombie Research Center poke and prod the rotting corpus of zombie culture trying to make sense of cult classics and the unstoppable growth of new and even more disturbing work. They exhume "zombie theory" and decaying historical documents from America, Europe, and the Caribbean in order to unearth the zombie world and arm readers with the brain tools necessary for everyday survival. Readers will see that zombie culture today "lives" in shapes as mutable as a zombie horde―and is often just as violent.

Edward P. Comentale is Professor of English at Indiana University. He is editor (with Stephen Watt and Skip Willman) of Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007 (IUP, 2005) and author of Sweet Air: Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song.

Aaron Jaffe is Professor of English at the University of Louisville. He is editor (with Edward P. Comentale) of The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies (IUP, 2009) and author of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity.