News Tip: Duke Expert on our Current Interest in Vampires

From the "Twilight" series to HBO's "True Blood," the vampire has become a pop culture phenomenon nearly everyone wants to sink their teeth into.

A Duke University faculty member says much of the interest in vampires reflect anxieties about viral contagion.

Carlos Rojas, who is teaching the course "Vampire Chronicles: Fantasies of Vampirism in a Cross-cultural Perspective" this semester, argues that many contemporary vampiric works are informed by a fascination with and fear of the power of infection. From HIV to H1N1, the specter of an infectious pandemic is this generation's version of the nuclear holocaust nightmares of the Cold War era, he says, and vampires give form to the threat of these viral elements with their ability to infect our most intimate personal spaces and social rituals.

"The perception that someone may be infected leads to a rethinking of social boundaries and the limits of personal space," says Rojas. "Society's current interest in vampires is partially driven by concerns with the potential risks of physical intimacy, together with the inherent invisibility of these infectious elements themselves."

Rojas' interest in vampires stems in part from his current research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in rural China, where one of the primary vectors of infection was the circulation of blood via institutionalized blood-selling.

"In post-Mao rural China, blood-selling represented the ultimate possibility of self-transformation," says Rojas, an assistant professor of Chinese cultural studies. "The tragic irony is that, for many peasants, this transformation yielded not financial empowerment, but rather a curse of living death."