Tourism and Hospitality

Duncan Light at the World Dracula Congress

Dr Duncan Light recently attended the 4^th World Dracula Congress was held at Trinity College, Dublin in October.  This brought together academics and fans interested in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Gothic literature, and the wider role of vampires within popular culture.  For more than 10 years Duncan has been researching ‘Dracula tourism’ in Romania and his book The Dracula Dilemma: Tourism, Identity and the State in Romania was republished by Routledge in 2016. His paper was entitled ‘Travel and Tourism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ and explored themes of tourism in the novel itself. He proposed that tourism offered a unique lens through which to examine many of the themes in Dracula. He argued that the novel was written at a time when tourism was an increasingly common practice in Victorian Britain so that many forms of contemporary tourism could be identified in the novel. Moreover, Bram Stoker used tourism as a way of underlining the modernity of late 19^th century Britain.  Duncan was also invited by an Austrian film production company to participate in a forthcoming documentary about Dracula tourism.