Contributors

Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He is the award-winning author, co-author, and editor of forty books, including Your Brain on Latino Comics; Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future; and Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia.

Bart Beaty is Professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Twelve-Cent Archie, Comics versus Art, and Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, among other works.

Sara Biggs Chaney is a lecturer and Associate Coordinator of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program at Dartmouth College.

Ian Blechschmidt received his PhD in communication studies from Northwestern University. He is currently a lecturer at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago, where he teaches courses in international comics and visual rhetoric. He has written extensively on gender in American underground comix and the Vietnam War comics series The ’Nam.

Frank Bramlett is a linguist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the editor or co-editor of several volumes of comics scholarship, including the Routledge Companion to Comics and Linguistics and the Study of Comics, among others.

Scott Bukatman is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He has published widely on playful embodiment in media phenomena ranging from cyberspace and Jerry Lewis to animation, musicals, comics, and superheroes. His most recent book is Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins.

andré carrington is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. In his first book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, he interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres through studies of fanzines, comics, film, television, and other speculative-fiction texts. He is currently at work on a second book, Audiofuturism, on the cultural politics of race in science fiction radio drama.

Michael Chaney is Professor of English at Dartmouth College and is the author of Reading Lessons in Seeing.

Michael Mark Cohen is Associate Teaching Professor of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence, and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly.

Brannon Costello is James F. Cassidy Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Neon Visions: The Comics of Howard Chaykin, winner of the Comics Studies Society’s inaugural Charles Hatfield Prize, and Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction.

Anthony Michael D’Agostino is a postdoctoral fellow in English at Fordham University. His work concentrates on the nineteenth-century novel, superhero comics, queer theory, and feminism. His articles, “Flesh-to-Flesh Contact: Marvel Comics’ Rogue and the Queer Feminist Imagination” and “Telepathy and Sadomasochism in Jane Eyre,” appear in American Literature and Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, respectively.

Blair Davis is Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies in the College of Communication at DePaul University in Chicago. His books include The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema, Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page, and Comic Book Movies. His comics-related essays are featured in such anthologies as The Blacker the Ink and Working-Class Comic Book Heroes and in such journals as Cinema Journal and Inks.

Ramzi Fawaz is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. With Darieck Scott, he co-edited the special issue of American Literature, “Queer about Comics,” which won the 2018 best special issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. His new book, Queer Forms, explores the influence of feminist and queer politics on American popular culture in the 1970s. Queer Forms will be published by New York University Press.

Margaret Galvan is Assistant Professor of Visual Rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. She is at work on a book, In Visible Archives of the 1980s: Feminist Politics & Queer Platforms, under contract with the University of Minnesota Press, which examines how publishing practices and archives have shaped understandings of the visual within feminist and queer activism. Her published work can be found in journals like American Literature, Archive Journal, Inks, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly.

Enrique García is Associate Professor of Hispanic Visual Culture at Middlebury College. He teaches classes about Hispanic sports, film, comic books, and music and has published articles that focus on a variety of subjects, from analyzing Robert Rodríguez’s Planet Terror to addressing the representation of Taíno culture in Puerto Rican comic books. He has published two academic books, one about Cuban cinema (Cuban Cinema after the Cold War) and another about Mexican American comic book artists Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez (The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics).

Jared Gardner is Professor of English and Director of Popular Culture Studies at the Ohio State University. He has authored and edited several volumes in comics studies, including Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling.

Ian Gordon is the author of a number of monographs, including Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon, the Eisner-nominated The Comics of Charles Schulz, Ben Katchor Conversations, and The Superhero Symbol: Media, Culture, and Politics. His other works include Kid Comic Strips: A Genre across Four Countries and Comic Strips and Consumer Culture. He teaches cultural history and media studies in Singapore.

Jonathan W. Gray is Associate Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and John Jay College. His first book, Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination, traces the white literary responses to the period between the Brown case and the death of Martin Luther King Jr. His forthcoming project, Illustrating the Race, investigates how the twin understandings of illustration—the creative act of depiction and the political act of bringing forth for public consideration—function in the representation of African Americans in comics and graphic narratives published since 1966.

Sean Guynes is a cultural historian, critic, and writer who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the author of the forthcoming books Whiteness (MIT Press) and Starship Troopers (Auteur Publishing) and a co-editor of the Encapsulations: Critical Comics Studies book series for University of Nebraska Press, two journal special issues, and several books—including Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics.

Justin Hall is Associate Professor of Comics at the California College of the Arts and the creator of the comics series Hard to Swallow (with Dave Davenport), True Travel Tales, and Glamazonia. He has stories published in the Houghton Mifflin Best American Comics, QU33R, Best Erotic Comics, and the SF Weekly, among others, and has exhibited his art in galleries and museums internationally. He edited the Lambda Literary Award–winning, Eisner-nominated No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, which he is now producing as a feature-length documentary film.

Charles Hatfield is Professor of English at California State University, Northridge. He is the author of Alternative Comics and Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, a co-editor (with Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester) of The Superhero Reader, and the curator of the 2015 CSUN Art Galleries exhibition Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby.

Andrew Hoberek is Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Considering Watchmen: Poetry, Property, Politics, and the Comics/Graphic Novels and an editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Yetta Howard is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and a codirector of the LGBTQ Research Consortium at San Diego State University. Howard is the author of Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground and the editor of Rated RX: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan.

Phil Jimenez is an Inkpot, Diamond, and Wizard Award–winning writer and artist who has worked for DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and a host of other comic book companies for over twenty-five years. Jimenez is best known for his work on Tempest, JLA/Titans, Planetary/Authority, The Invisibles, New X-Men, Wonder Woman, Infinite Crisis, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Transformers, DC: Rebirth, and Superwoman and for his creator-owned project, Otherworld. He is currently drawing Historia, the Black Label graphic novel written by Kelly Sue DeConnick for DC Comics.

Aaron Kashtan is a lecturer in the University Writing Program at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He received his PhD in English from the University of Florida and has also taught at Georgia Tech and Miami University, Ohio. His first book, Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future, was published by Ohio State University Press in spring 2018.

Cáel M. Keegan is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies at Grand Valley State University. He is the author of Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender and a co-editor of Somatechnics 8.1, “Cinematic Bodies.” His writing has also appeared in Genders, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Mediekultur, Spectator, and Journal of Homosexuality.

Adam L. Kern earned a PhD in Japanese literature from Harvard University, where he was on the faculty for nearly a decade before joining the University of Wisconsin–Madison as Professor of Japanese Literature and Visual Culture. Kern’s books include Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyōshi of Edo Japan, a second edition of which has just been published.

Joo Ok Kim is Assistant Professor of International and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Kansas. Her work has appeared in Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge, and South, among others.

Ellen Kirkpatrick is an independent scholar. She received her PhD in comics, culture, and identity at Kingston University, London. Her research examines how fantasy inspires and intersects with real-world politics, media fandom, (counter)storytelling, and activism. Her monograph, Superhero Culture: A Multimodal (Counter)Story is forthcoming. Her work has appeared in Transformative Works and Cultures, Cinema Journal, In Media Res, Feminist Review, and the collection Seeing Fans (edited by Lucy Bennett and Paul Booth).

Susan Kirtley is Professor of English, Director of Rhetoric and Composition, and Director of Comics Studies at Portland State University. Her research interests include visual rhetoric and graphic narratives, and she has published pieces on comics for the popular press and academic journals. Her book, Lynda Barry: Girlhood through the Looking Glass, was the 2013 Eisner Award winner for Best Educational/Academic Work.

Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg joined the faculty in the journalism program at Seton Hall University in 1993. She is the author of Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code as well as numerous articles and book chapters on various aspects of comic book censorship. She also conducts research into comics journalism and its creators.

Joshua Abraham Kopin received his PhD in American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He recently completed a dissertation that frames comics as a nineteenth-century technology of time and space. His work has appeared in American Literature and Inks.

Isabel Millán is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon. Recent publications include “Contested Children’s Literature: Que(e)ries into Chicana and Central American Autofantasías” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and “Engineering Afro-Latina and Mexican Immigrant Heroines: Biopolitics in Borderlands Speculative Literature and Film” in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. Millán has also published chapters in Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future and The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture.

Leah Misemer is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her upcoming book projects include Comics Correspondents: The Counterpublics of Seriality and Invisible Made Visible: Comics and Mental Illness, co-authored with Jessica Gross.

Mimi Thi Nguyen (she/her) is Associate Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages and “The Hoodie as Sign, Screen, Expectation, and Force” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

Tahneer Oksman is Associate Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College. She is the author of “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs and a co-editor of the anthology The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place inside Yourself. She is the graphic novel editor for Women’s Review of Books.

Dr. Osvaldo Oyola is a public scholar, editor, and member of the International Comic Arts Forum executive board. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Shelfdust, and Apex Magazine, and he has a chapter in the forthcoming Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics. He is the first winner of the Gilbert Seldes Prize for Public Scholarship, awarded by the Comics Studies Society.

Christopher Pizzino is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, and his essays are featured in Comics Studies Here and Now, Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, and Comics Memory: Archive and Styles, among others.

Barbara Postema is Senior Lecturer of English at Massey University in New Zealand. Her monograph, Narrative Structure in Comics, was published with RIT Press in 2013. She has contributed work on comics to Image and Narrative, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and International Journal of Comic Art, as well as collections such as The Routledge Companion to Comics and Graphic Novels. She is a co-editor (together with Candida Rifkind and Nhora Lucía Serrano) of a new book series from Wilfred Laurier University Press, Crossing the Lines: Transcultural/Transnational Comics Studies.

Jessica Quick Stark is a poet and scholar that lives in Durham, North Carolina. She is currently working on her first scholarly book project on experimental poets’ use of comics, cartoons, and pictorial media in twentieth-century US American poetry. Her first full-length poetry collection, Savage Pageant, is forthcoming with Birds LLC in 2020. She writes poetry reviews for Carolina Quarterly and serves as a poetry reader for Split Lip Magazine. She writes an ongoing poetry comics zine called INNANET.

Stacey Robinson is Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Illinois. As part of the collaborative team Black Kirby with artist John Jennings, he creates graphic novels, gallery exhibitions, and lectures that deconstruct the work of artist Jack Kirby to reimagine Black resistance spaces inspired by hip-hop, religion, the arts, and sciences. His latest graphic novel, I Am Alfonso Jones, with writer Tony Medina is available from Lee & Low Books.

Nicholas Sammond is Director of the Centre of the Study of the United States and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation and Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960. Both books received the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Dr. Benjamin Saunders is Professor of English at the University of Oregon, where he founded the undergraduate minor in comics studies. He is the author of Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation, short-listed by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title of the Year, and Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes, which has been described by novelist and comic book writer Greg Rucka as “the best critical work on the meaning and impact of superheroes that has ever been written.” Saunders is a co-editor (with Charles Hatfield) of Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby.

Cathy Schlund-Vials is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English and Asian / Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is also Associate Dean for Humanities in UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She has co-edited a number of volumes on race, human rights, and historical trauma, including Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels and Keywords for Asian American Studies.

Darieck Scott is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Scott is the author of Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination, winner of the 2011 Alan Bray Memorial Prize for Queer Studies from the Modern Language Association. Scott is also the author of the novels Hex and Traitor to the Race and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica. With Ramzi Fawaz, he is a co-editor of the American Literature special issue, “Queer about Comics,” which was awarded the 2018 Best Special Issue by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

Alexandro Segade is an interdisciplinary artist whose solo performance work has appeared at the Broad, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, and LAXART in Los Angeles; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; and MoMA PS1, among others. Since 2000, Segade has worked with Malik Gaines and Jade Gordon in My Barbarian, an art collective included in the Whitney Biennial, and is the subject of a solo exhibition at the New Museum in 2016 and a survey at the Whitney in 2020. Segade also cofounded ARM, a collective exploring queer histories in art projects at the Whitney and High Line, New York; Rogaland Kunstcenter, Norway; and Espacio Odéon, Bogota, Colombia.

Matt Silady was raised in the Chicagoland area, where he taught public school before studying creative writing at the University of California, Davis. He published the Eisner-nominated graphic novel The Homeless Channel. Since then, Matt accepted a teaching position at California College of the Arts (CCA), where he helped expand the college’s undergraduate comics curriculum and founded CCA’s MFA in Comics Program. His recent projects include FOLIO Award–nominated “The Great Wine Heist” for Sonoma Magazine.

Christopher Spaide is a lecturer in the Department of English at Harvard University, where he focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. His essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Cambridge Quarterly, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, Poetry, and the Yale Review.

Gregory Steirer is Assistant Professor of English at Dickinson College. His work focuses on media industries, intellectual property law, and digital culture and has appeared in a variety of journals and edited collections. His book on the American comic book industry and Hollywood, co-authored with Alisa Perren, will be published by BFI/Bloomsbury in 2020.

Shelley Streeby (she/her) is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism and Radical Sensations: World-Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture.

Carol L. Tilley is Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of comics, libraries, and young people, particularly in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. She is a former president of the Comics Studies Society and a 2016 Eisner Award judge.

Rebecca Wanzo is Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Sentimental Storytelling and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging. Her work can also be found in journals such as American Literature, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and Women & Performance.

Deborah Elizabeth Whaley is Professor of American and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. Her books include Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime and Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities. With Ramzi Fawaz and Shelley Streeby, she is a co-editor of Keywords in Comics Studies.

Benjamin Woo is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). He is the director of the Comic Cons Research Project, the author of Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture, co-author (with Bart Beaty) of The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books, and a co-editor (with Stuart R. Poyntz and Jamie Rennie) of Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective.

Nicholas Yanes earned a doctorate in American studies from the University of Iowa and is a co-editor of two books, one on the representations of Obama in popular culture and the other on fan responses to the Hannibal Lecter franchise, both published by McFarland Press. He is currently an entertainment journalist and freelance writer.

Matt Yockey is Associate Professor of Theater and Film at the University of Toledo. He is the author of Batman and the editor of Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe.