About

Dr. Carol Senf received her PhD in Victorian Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and has been a faculty member at Georgia Tech since 1981. She is currently a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. Her scholarly work focuses on Victorian literature, Gothic literature, and the intersections of literature and science, with particular interests in biomedicine and culture, film and literature, and gender and social justice issues. Dr. Senf has published extensively on Victorian authors, especially Bram Stoker, and has authored books including 'Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker's Fiction' and 'Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism,' the latter of which received the Lord Ruthven Assembly award for best non-fiction in 1998. Her research also encompasses Gothic spaces, the evolution of Gothic themes, and the cultural reflections within Victorian and neo-Victorian contexts.

Research topics

• Literature
• Philosophy
• Art
• Epistemology
• History
• Aesthetics
• Law
• Medicine
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Chapter 4 The Paradigm of Dracula: 100 Years of Evolution

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2025-03-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Victorian Female Vampires and the New Woman

  2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Exploring Women’s Possibilities at the Fin de Siècle: Sarah Grand’s Quest for Women’s Enlightenment

  British women's writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Fred Saberhagen’s Dracula: The Vampire as Neo-Victorian Hero

  2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Referee report. For: The “Rotten” matter in A Farewell to Arms: An Ecological Gothic reading [version 2; peer review: 1 approved, 2 approved with reservations]

  Faculty of 1000 Research Ltd · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Victorian Female Vampires and the New Woman

  Springer eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• <i>Dracula</i>, Blood, and the New Woman: Stoker’s Reflections on the Zeitgeist

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • History

  In this chapter the author probes beneath the melodramatic surface of the story of Count Dracula, to reveal more subtle narrative threads, relating to Bram Stoker's critical social observations, both looking back in time, where many metaphorical dimensions of ‘blood’ are in play, and forward in time to late-nineteenth-century changes in gender relations, particularly as encapsulated in the figure of the ‘New Woman’. Just as blood-steeped history is conspicuous on the melodramatic surface of the fiction, so a forward-looking, scientific, and liberated future is discernible just beneath that surface.

  PublisherDOI

• The Mysteries of the Post-Communist Vampire: Detective Features in the Novel Nepotul lui Dracula by Alexandru Mușina

  Caietele Echinox · 2022-12-01

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  "The association of the vampire with Eastern Europe has evolved in crime fictions which transform this fantastic character from a supernatural being to a means to comment on politics, many of them focusing on the imagological opposition between Eastern Europe and the Western world, a treatment that began with Stoker’s Dracula. Our paper analyses the transformation of this imagological vampiric stereotype, by investigating the deconstructivist novel Nepotul lui Dracula (Dracula’s Nephew) (2012) by the Romanian writer Alexandru Mușina."

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Transformation of Tradition

  Springer eBooks · 2021 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

• Bram Stoker’s Ambivalent Response to the Frontier and the American Frontiersman

  Clemson University Press eBooks · 2019-01-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dina Khapaeva

  26 shared

• Paul Freedman

  25 shared

• Hardy Dickens

  Yale University

  25 shared

• Kelly Doyle

  ARUP Laboratories (United States)

  25 shared

• Jacque Lynn Foltyn

  25 shared

• Sami Pihlström

  25 shared

• Svetlana Tcareva

  Kwantlen Polytechnic University

  25 shared

• Sherri Brown

  17 shared

Awards & honors

• Victorian Studies (no specific award mentioned)
• Lord Ruthven Assembly award for best non-fiction in 1998