SEC Connections: Kentucky

One of the precursors of The University of Kentucky was Transylvania University, and UT Regents Professor Thomas J. Garza wrote the book "Slavic Blood: The Vampire in Russian and East European Cultures." This SEC Connection is pure silliness, of course, but does surface some interesting facts:

"Transylvania" means "across the woods," and the name originally stems from the university's founding in the heavily forested Transylvania Colony, which existed in western Kentucky for only a year before the American Revolution. In another connection, one 1810 graduate of Transylvania University was none other than Stephen F. Austin, the Father of Texas. In 1865, Transylvania University merged with another private university with a religious affiliation, Kentucky University, and took its name.

But to take advantage of the Morrill Act that created public land-grant universities, the school spun off its Agricultural & Mechanical College in 1878 as an independent, state-run institution due to the separation of church and state. And in 1908, Kentucky University re-adopted the Transylvania name to avoid ongoing confusion with its now more famous daughter institution, the University of Kentucky.

The term "Transylvania" became associated with Dracula in 1897, with the publication of Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula," in which the fictional vampire count lives in Transylvania, a region of Romania. Professor Garza is University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and founding director of the Texas Language Center. He teaches Russian language and literature at all levels, foreign language pedagogy and courses in contemporary Russian culture.