Congratulation to Martha Schulenburg, who will be presenting a paper entitled “‘Those Theda Bara Eyes’: The Remediation of the Vamp from Cinema to Tin Pan Alley” at the American Musicological Society annual conference. This paper explores the creation and refashioning of the vampire women or “vamp” in American cinema and Tin Pan Alley during the 1910s and ’20s. Looking at a selection of songs about actress Theda Bara, Hollywood’s first sex symbol, Martha details how the commodification of the vamp in popular novelty song inadvertently normalized both the transgressive femme fatale and the music most closely associated with her: jazz.

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