William Schnabel

William Schnabel was born in Sacramento, California and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Dramatic Art. Today, he is a full professor at the University of Lorraine in France where he teaches American history and literature. He also teaches courses in science fiction and horror fiction. Having grown up in the sixties, he witnessed firsthand events that shaped the civil rights movement, the “free speech” movement at U.C. Berkeley, the movement against the Vietnam War, the rise of the counterculture in San Francisco, and the evolution of SDS and the Black Panthers, among other things. He lived in the Haight-Ashbury district in the sixties and often attended the concerts at the Avalon Ballroom, the Matrix, Winterland and Fillmore Auditorium. During the course of the decade, he came across or spoke to Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Allen Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Jerry Garcia, Chet Helms, Bill Graham, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, Country Joe McDonald, et al.

From 1998 to 2004 he was director and executive editor of the research center at the University of Grenoble known as the GERF (Groupe d’études et de recherche sur le fantastique), where he published Les Cahiers du Gerf and organized international conferences on such topics as Feminism in Horror Fiction, Hybridism, Religion and Imagination, Contemporary Horror Fiction, French Horror Fiction, and Jules Verne.

William Schnabel has published numerous texts on H. P. Lovecraft, an author he discovered in his youth, as well as Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, William Blatty, Dean Ray Koontz, Dino Buzzati, Fritz Leiber, Michael Crichton, Jérôme Leroy, Joyce Carol Oates, N. Scott Momaday, Claude Seignolle, Jules Verne, George Orwell, Kim Stanley Robinson, et al.