The Strange Case of William Seabrook: Traveller, Pervert, Occultist, Drunk, and the Man Who Brought the Zombie to America

• History
• Religion & Spirituality

An illustrated lecture with Robert Luckhurst

This talk explores the life and times of William B. Seabrook, 1920s ‘lost generation’ journalist and travel writer, famous in the ’20s and ’30s for joining a cannibal cult in West Africa, living amongst the Bedouin in Arabia, and participation in voodoo rites in Haiti, as well as a scandalous boozy life amongst the Modernists on the French Riviera and the occultists of London and Paris. Seabrook was responsible for importing the idea of the ‘zombie’ into American popular culture in 1929, but he had many other elements to his bizarre career, including associations with Man Ray, Gertrude Stein, Georges Batailles and Aleister Crowley.

Roger Luckhurst investigates the blurry edge where superstition and the supernatural cross between fact and fiction. He has written books on the invention of ‘telepathy’ in the 1880s, excavated the ‘true’ story of the British Museum mummy’s curse, and also last year published *Zombies: A  Cultural History*. He teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London, but is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in New York.