We are pleased to invite you to the second lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025/26 Spring semester!
Sarah Juliet Lauro Ph.D
(University of Tampa)
“Zombies, Vampires, and Climate Change in the Films of Jim Jarmusch”
Thursday, April 16, 2026
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
The comparison between vampires and zombies and cannibal capitalism is not new. Moving beyond syllogisms about the consumption of these monsters, my recent work enriches our understanding of their relation to capitalism with a look at their relevance to the climate crisis. Focusing not merely on how the undead metaphorize our discomfort with capitalism, this talk pivots to their reflection of capitalism’s relationship to nature, and, its latest innovation, capitalism’s relationship to the climate crisis. This talk pairs two films by acclaimed filmmaker Jim Jarmusch: one featuring vampires, the other, zombies, both decidedly about climate catastrophe and capitalism. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) is a story of centuries-old vampires amidst the capitalist ruins of Detroit, once the vibrant “motor city” where US car manufacturing was based that was devastated with the outsourcing of jobs overseas and foreign manufacture. The campy film The Dead Don’t Die (2019) is a narrative in which “polar fracking” has caused the dead to rise, and in which genre conventions emphasize the frustration of climate apathy: we know the outcome of our actions yet keep plodding forward like a zombie. Looking at more recent applications of the vampire and zombie specifically to narratives of climate change draws out a sense that these disparate undead figures, in the end, do similar work in our frightening historical moment: like an immortal vampire, we have outlived our planet; like a walking corpse, with the ecological “tipping point” already behind us, we may be dead already.
Who?
Sarah Juliet Lauro Ph.D, is an associate professor in the department of English at the University of Tampa. Although she has published in other areas, she is most known for her work on the zombie, including the monograph The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death (2015) and collection Zombie Theory: A Reader (2018) and the celebrated essay “A Zombie Manifesto,” which has been translated into Turkish and Japanese. She is currently a fellow at Heidelberg University’s Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Study, where she is beginning work on a new book project on vampires, zombies, capitalism, and the end of the world. She is the editor of the journal Studies in the Fantastic.
