John Edgar Browning

John Edgar Browning (born October 14, 1980) is an American author, editor, and scholar known for his nonfiction works about the horror genre and vampires in film, literature, and culture.

Previously a visiting lecturer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he is now a professor of liberal arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia.

Browning is considered an "expert on vampires specializing in the Dracula figure in film, literature, television, and popular culture."

His works expound upon Dracula, horror, vampires, the supernatural, the un-dead, Bram Stoker, and gothic and cultural theory.

Browning has appeared as an expert vampire and horror scholar on, or served as a consultant for, multiple documentary television series, including: National Geographic Channel's Taboo USA, Discovery Channel's William Shatner's Weird or What?, the seven-part AMC documentary series Eli Roth's History of Horror, and History Channel's The UnXplained.

For his book Dracula in Visual Media, Browning documented over 700 "domestic and international Dracula films, television programs, documentaries, adult features, animations, and video games . . . [as well as] nearly 1000 domestic and international comic book titles and stage adaptations."

For the book, Browning won the Lord Ruthven Award, an award for deserving work in vampire fiction or scholarship.

He also sits on the Editorial Advisory Panel for Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (a Springer Nature journal), previously called Palgrave Communications; the Advisory Board for Ethics International Press, founded in 1993 in Cambridge, UK to publish "academic books on Ethics and all related and associated topics" for "leading universities worldwide, the British Government, the European Commission, and to wholesalers, bookshops, libraries, agents, and individuals around the world"; the Editorial Board for the Journal of Positive Sexuality, a multidisciplinary publication "designed to be accessible and beneficial to a large and diverse readership, including academics, policymakers, clinicians, educators, and students"; the Advisory Board for the Series on Law, Culture and the Humanities, edited by Caroline Joan S. Picart and published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; as well as the Executive Advisory Committee for The Journal of Gods and Monsters, published through the Department of Philosophy at Texas State University.

The book was also nominated for a Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award (a.k.a. a "Rondo Award") for Book of the Year in 2011, as was his book The Vampire; or, Detective Brand's Greatest Case in 2023 for Best Classic Horror Fiction, co-edited with Gary D.. Rhodes.

Browning earned his B.A. from Florida State University and then his M.A. at the University of Central Oklahoma.

He completed all his English doctoral coursework at Louisiana State University before transferring to American Studies at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (SUNY-Buffalo), where he studied under Michael H. Frisch, Bruce Jackson, Sarah Elder, and Donald A. Grinde, Jr.

At SUNY-Buffalo, Browning received an Arthur A. Schomburg Fellowship in the Department of Transnational Studies.

While there, Browning continued his doctoral studies and served as an adjunct instructor in English.

One of the courses Browning taught at SUNY-Buffalo was "A Cultural History of the Walking Dead," a fifteen-week course.

The course drew on Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend as well as the films of George Romero.

While teaching at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Browning lectured on vampires, zombies, and monsters, as well as on Slasher cinema in a course entitled, "The Slasher Film: Gender, Disability, and Transgression."

For part of his doctoral dissertation, Browning conducted, over a period of two years, an ethnographic study of people who self-identify as vampire in New Orleans.

Browning's fieldnotes recount the experience: "On the eve of the second Tuesday of every month, I have become, to the watchful bystander, a familiar presence in the French Quarter. Flying through the dusky sky over Bourbon Street, as I strolled along casually, were fast, sweeping brown bats: An homage, maybe, to the business of interviewing vampires? To my side hung the trusty brown leather Satchel that housed my pen and paper, and digital voice recorder. I left politely at home, of course, the crucifix I didn't actually own, and the short wooden stake carved for me by an older brother when I was younger. For indeed the vampires with whom I was meeting tonight were not prisoners of lore and legend: theirs was a new lore, and they were becoming very quickly their own legend."

Browning extended his ethnographic fieldwork to include real vampires living in Buffalo, NY.

For an op-ed in Deep South Magazine entitled Conversations with Real Vampires, Browning's notes further recount the experience: "We are meeting an hour later than usual for the third month in a row, because the sun, during the summer months, sets closer to 9 instead of 8. Tonight, I will ask for the first time if I can watch them feed."

Browning has more recently elaborated on his experiences in Palgrave Communications, The Conversation UK, twice in Discover (magazine) and The Atlantic.

Browning sits on a number of editorial and advisory boards, including the Board of Advisors for The Blood Project (TBP) based out of Harvard Medical School, its members representing "leaders in their fields, including hematology, medical education, history of medicine, comparative and evolutionary medicine, art and medicine, literature in medicine, health literacy, and medical training in under-represented minorities".