Good to be bad

Good to be bad

Kristin Bauer Van Straten, BFA ’88, is best known for playing the fashionable, no-nonsense vampire Pam De Beaufort on HBO’s True Blood. But when she was younger, she was interested in another art, painting, which led her to Washington University.
The language of the undead

The language of the undead

As a linguist and professor at Swarthmore, one might wonder why Jamie Thomas, AB ’06, is interested in zombies. She’s found that representations of the undead can help us better understand the dehumanization and fear that accompany racism, sexism and other languages of hate.