I always swore I’d never set foot in school again but now I kind of want to.
The University of Maryland has added a course on zombies in pop culture , called “Zombiemania,” to this year’s curriculum. Professor Arnold Blumberg is teaching the class, covering 16 zombie films, and says the zombie genre is an important reflection of society in literature and film:
“Zombies are one of the most potent, direct reflections of what we’re thinking moment to moment in our culture,” Blumberg tells the class in explaining why they’re all here.
Blumberg seems to be pulling the old education trick of sliding serious academic material in under the guise of “fun” stuff:
“This hopefully is as dry and historical as we’ll get for the rest for the semester,” he says during a discourse on the misguided interpretation of West Indian rituals that allowed zombies into popular culture in the 1930s. “We’ll get the blood and guts flying up on the screen soon enough.”
Among the official course objectives, he lists “get you ready for a zombie apocalypse.”
The University of Baltimore isn’t the first college to hop on the zombie bandwagon- a Chicago area college has had a similar course in their catalog for years. Blumberg did not say if life experience getting high while watching Romero marathons was applicable to course study.
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