JAN BAETENS is professor of literary theory and cultural studies at the University of Leuven, Belgium, where he works in the fields of French poetry analysis and graphic narrative. He has published widely on both topics, and his recent books include À voix haute: Poésie et lecture publique (2016), The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (coauthored with Hugo Frey, 2014), and The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (coedited with Hugo Frey and Stephen Tabachnick, 2018). He is also a published French-language poet; his most recent collection is Ici, mais plus maintenant (incorporating photographs by Milan Chlumsky, 2019).
BART BEATY is the author, editor, and translator of more than twenty books in the field of comics studies, including Twelve-Cent Archie (2015) and Comics versus Art (2012). He is the general editor of the Critical Survey of Graphic Novels (2012; revised 2018–2019) and the lead researcher on the What Were Comics? project (whatwerecomics.com).
ISAAC CATES has published essays on the difficulty of Chris Ware, the pseudoautobiographical collaborations of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, the diary comics of James Kochalka, and climactic fistfights between Batman and Superman. He has also written several essays on poetry, as well as numerous poems (including one that appeared in The Best American Poetry 2017) and comics. He edited and published the award-winning, all-ages fantasy comics anthology Cartozia Tales. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Vermont.
MEL GIBSON is associate professor at Northumbria University, United Kingdom, specializing in teaching and research related to comics, graphic novels, picture books, and fiction for children. She has published widely in these areas, including the monograph Remembered Reading (2015), on British women’s memories of their girlhood comics-reading. Her most recent work focuses on girlhoods, agency, and contemporary comics. She has also run training and promotional events about comics, manga, and graphic novels for schools and other organizations since 1993, when she contributed to Graphic Account, a publication that focused on developing graphic novel collections for sixteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, which was published by the Youth Libraries Group in the United Kingdom.
IAN GORDON’s most recent books are Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon (2017), the Eisner-nominated The Comics of Charles Schulz (coedited with Jared Gardner, 2017), Ben Katchor: Conversations (2018), and The Superhero Symbol: Media, Culture, and Politics (coedited with Liam Burke and Angela Ndalianis, 2019). His other works include Kid Comic Strips: A Genre across Four Countries (2016) and Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (1998). He teaches cultural history and American studies at the National University of Singapore, where he is the head of the Department of History. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Australasian Journal of American Studies, ImageText, Inks, the International Journal of Comic Art, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Popular Communication, and Studies in Comics.
CHARLES HATFIELD is professor of English at California State University, Northridge, author of Alternative Comics (2005) and Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (2011), coeditor (with Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester) of The Superhero Reader (2013), and curator of the exhibition Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby (2015). His essays have appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, Keywords for Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, ImageText, SubStance, The Comics Journal, and other books and periodicals. He has chaired both the International Comic Arts Forum and the MLA Forum on Comics and Graphic Narratives, and served as founding president (2015–2018) of the Comics Studies Society.
MARTHA KUHLMAN is professor of comparative literature in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University. With Dave Ball, she coedited The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking (2010), and she has contributed chapters to a number of books about graphic novels, including The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel (2017), Abstraction and Comics / Bande dessinée et abstraction (2019), and Teaching the Graphic Novel (2009). She served on the MLA Forum on Comics and Graphic Narratives from 2012 to 2017 and on the Comics Studies Society executive board from 2017 to 2019. Most recently, she has coedited, with José Alaniz, the anthology Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (2020).
FRENCHY LUNNING is professor of liberal arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, specializing in art and design history and cultural studies. She has written two books and is working on a third, Revolutionary Girl: Shōjo. She has recently begun working in object-oriented ontology and has chapters in two anthologies, After the “Speculative Turn”: Realism, Philosophy and Feminism (2016), edited by Katerina Kolozova and Eileen A. Joy, and Object-Oriented Feminism (2016), edited by Katherine Behar. As the director of the internationally recognized Mechademia Conferences on Asian Popular Cultures, she was previously the editor-in-chief of Mechademia, a book series published by the University of Minnesota Press dedicated to Japanese popular culture and theory, and she currently coedits Mechademia: Second Arc, a biannual journal covering Asian popular culture.
BRIAN MACAULEY was, in the Pre-Crisis universe, a full-time assistant professor at Newbury College in Brookline, Massachusetts. Current continuity reboots the character and depicts MacAuley as a stay-at-home father to two sons.
MATTHEW P. MCALLISTER is professor of communications, communication arts and sciences, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the Pennsylvania State University, as well as Graduate Programs Chair of Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. His research focuses on the political economy of media and critiques of commercial culture. He is the author of The Commercialization of American Culture (1996) and coeditor of Comics and Ideology (2001), Film and Comic Books (2007), The Advertising and Consumer Culture Reader (2009), and The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture (2013).
ANDREI MOLOTIU is senior lecturer in the Department of Art History at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Fragonard’s Allegories of Love (2008), the Eisner-nominated Abstract Comics: The Anthology (2009), and Nautilus (2009), a collection of his own comics. He is currently completing his first graphic novel.
PHILIP NEL is university distinguished professor of English at Kansas State University. He is the author or coeditor of eleven books, including Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (2017), three volumes of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby (coedited with Eric Reynolds, 2013, 2014, 2016), a double biography of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss (2012), Keywords for Children’s Literature (coedited with Lissa Paul, 2011), and Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (coedited with Julia Mickenberg, 2008). Forthcoming soon are the second edition of Keywords for Children’s Literature (coedited with Lissa Paul and Nina Christensen) and the fourth volume of Johnson’s Barnaby (coedited with Reynolds).
ROGER SABIN is professor of popular culture at the University of the Arts London. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of eight books, including Adult Comics (1993) and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (1996), and was part of the team that put together the 2016 Marie Duval Archive (marieduval.org), a collaboration of Chester University, Central Saint Martins at University of Arts London, and Guildhall Library. He serves on the boards of eight research journals, and is series editor for the booklist Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. His journalism includes work for the Guardian, BBC, and Channel 4, and he has been a curatorial consultant for the British Museum, British Library, and Tate Gallery. The Sabin Award for Comics Scholarship is awarded annually at the International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference.
KALERVO SINERVO holds a degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University, where he wrote his thesis on the transmedial intersections of fandom, video games, and Gotham City. He served for two terms as the Communications Vice President for the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics and has written broadly on comics as a form and culture, including a chapter (cowritten with Darren Wershler) on Marvel’s early digital strategies for Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe (2017) and an article on comics piracy for Amodern (cowritten with Wershler and Shannon Tien, 2013). In 2019, he began a Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary. Find him online @kalervideo and at badpanels.com.
MARC SINGER is professor of English at Howard University in Washington, DC. He is the author of Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies (2018) and Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics (2012), and is the coeditor, with Nels Pearson, of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (2009).
THERESA TENSUAN, dean of Diversity, Access, and Community Engagement and director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs at Haverford College, works to foster connections among diversity, academic excellence, and community engagement. As a teacher and scholar, she focuses on autobiography, visual culture studies, and critical discourses around race and gender. She has published essays in Biography and in Transforming the Academy: Faculty Perspectives on Diversity and Pedagogy (edited by Sarah Willie-LeBreton, 2016), and she coedited, with Cynthia Dobbs and Daphne Lamothe, a special issue of Biography on “Life Stories from the Creole City” (2012).
SHANNON TIEN holds an MA in English from Concordia University and is currently the inbound marketing lead at Hootsuite, where she runs the world’s number-one educational blog on social media marketing. She teaches search engine optimization and best practices in web writing to traditionally trained writers and helps organizations of all sizes build their own lead-generating online publications. Her cultural criticism and essays have appeared in the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Believer, and more.
DARREN WERSHLER holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature, and is the cofounder of the Media History Research Centre and the director of the Residual Media Depot. He is currently writing The Lab Book: Situated Practice in Media Studies, with Jussi Parikka and Lori Emerson.
GILLIAN WHITLOCK is emeritus professor of English in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is author of The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (2000), Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (2006), and Postcolonial Life Narrative: Testimonial Transactions (2015), as well as numerous chapters and articles on life writing. Her current research project on “The Testimony of Things” focuses on the literature and arts of the asylum-seeker camps in the Pacific.
BENJAMIN WOO is associate professor of communication and media studies at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) and director of the Comic Cons Research Project (comicconsproject.org). His research examines contemporary geek media cultures and the production, circulation, and reception of comic books and graphic novels. He is the author of Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture (2018), coauthor (with Bart Beaty) of The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books (2016), and coeditor (with Stuart R. Poyntz and Jamie Rennie) of Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective (2016).
BART BEATY is the author, editor, and translator of more than twenty books in the field of comics studies, including Twelve-Cent Archie (2015) and Comics versus Art (2012). He is the general editor of the Critical Survey of Graphic Novels (2012; revised 2018–2019) and the lead researcher on the What Were Comics? project (whatwerecomics.com).
ISAAC CATES has published essays on the difficulty of Chris Ware, the pseudoautobiographical collaborations of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, the diary comics of James Kochalka, and climactic fistfights between Batman and Superman. He has also written several essays on poetry, as well as numerous poems (including one that appeared in The Best American Poetry 2017) and comics. He edited and published the award-winning, all-ages fantasy comics anthology Cartozia Tales. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Vermont.
MEL GIBSON is associate professor at Northumbria University, United Kingdom, specializing in teaching and research related to comics, graphic novels, picture books, and fiction for children. She has published widely in these areas, including the monograph Remembered Reading (2015), on British women’s memories of their girlhood comics-reading. Her most recent work focuses on girlhoods, agency, and contemporary comics. She has also run training and promotional events about comics, manga, and graphic novels for schools and other organizations since 1993, when she contributed to Graphic Account, a publication that focused on developing graphic novel collections for sixteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, which was published by the Youth Libraries Group in the United Kingdom.
IAN GORDON’s most recent books are Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon (2017), the Eisner-nominated The Comics of Charles Schulz (coedited with Jared Gardner, 2017), Ben Katchor: Conversations (2018), and The Superhero Symbol: Media, Culture, and Politics (coedited with Liam Burke and Angela Ndalianis, 2019). His other works include Kid Comic Strips: A Genre across Four Countries (2016) and Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (1998). He teaches cultural history and American studies at the National University of Singapore, where he is the head of the Department of History. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Australasian Journal of American Studies, ImageText, Inks, the International Journal of Comic Art, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Popular Communication, and Studies in Comics.
CHARLES HATFIELD is professor of English at California State University, Northridge, author of Alternative Comics (2005) and Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (2011), coeditor (with Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester) of The Superhero Reader (2013), and curator of the exhibition Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby (2015). His essays have appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, Keywords for Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, ImageText, SubStance, The Comics Journal, and other books and periodicals. He has chaired both the International Comic Arts Forum and the MLA Forum on Comics and Graphic Narratives, and served as founding president (2015–2018) of the Comics Studies Society.
MARTHA KUHLMAN is professor of comparative literature in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University. With Dave Ball, she coedited The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking (2010), and she has contributed chapters to a number of books about graphic novels, including The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel (2017), Abstraction and Comics / Bande dessinée et abstraction (2019), and Teaching the Graphic Novel (2009). She served on the MLA Forum on Comics and Graphic Narratives from 2012 to 2017 and on the Comics Studies Society executive board from 2017 to 2019. Most recently, she has coedited, with José Alaniz, the anthology Comics of the New Europe: Reflections and Intersections (2020).
FRENCHY LUNNING is professor of liberal arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, specializing in art and design history and cultural studies. She has written two books and is working on a third, Revolutionary Girl: Shōjo. She has recently begun working in object-oriented ontology and has chapters in two anthologies, After the “Speculative Turn”: Realism, Philosophy and Feminism (2016), edited by Katerina Kolozova and Eileen A. Joy, and Object-Oriented Feminism (2016), edited by Katherine Behar. As the director of the internationally recognized Mechademia Conferences on Asian Popular Cultures, she was previously the editor-in-chief of Mechademia, a book series published by the University of Minnesota Press dedicated to Japanese popular culture and theory, and she currently coedits Mechademia: Second Arc, a biannual journal covering Asian popular culture.
BRIAN MACAULEY was, in the Pre-Crisis universe, a full-time assistant professor at Newbury College in Brookline, Massachusetts. Current continuity reboots the character and depicts MacAuley as a stay-at-home father to two sons.
MATTHEW P. MCALLISTER is professor of communications, communication arts and sciences, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the Pennsylvania State University, as well as Graduate Programs Chair of Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. His research focuses on the political economy of media and critiques of commercial culture. He is the author of The Commercialization of American Culture (1996) and coeditor of Comics and Ideology (2001), Film and Comic Books (2007), The Advertising and Consumer Culture Reader (2009), and The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture (2013).
ANDREI MOLOTIU is senior lecturer in the Department of Art History at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Fragonard’s Allegories of Love (2008), the Eisner-nominated Abstract Comics: The Anthology (2009), and Nautilus (2009), a collection of his own comics. He is currently completing his first graphic novel.
PHILIP NEL is university distinguished professor of English at Kansas State University. He is the author or coeditor of eleven books, including Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (2017), three volumes of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby (coedited with Eric Reynolds, 2013, 2014, 2016), a double biography of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss (2012), Keywords for Children’s Literature (coedited with Lissa Paul, 2011), and Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (coedited with Julia Mickenberg, 2008). Forthcoming soon are the second edition of Keywords for Children’s Literature (coedited with Lissa Paul and Nina Christensen) and the fourth volume of Johnson’s Barnaby (coedited with Reynolds).
ROGER SABIN is professor of popular culture at the University of the Arts London. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of eight books, including Adult Comics (1993) and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (1996), and was part of the team that put together the 2016 Marie Duval Archive (marieduval.org), a collaboration of Chester University, Central Saint Martins at University of Arts London, and Guildhall Library. He serves on the boards of eight research journals, and is series editor for the booklist Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. His journalism includes work for the Guardian, BBC, and Channel 4, and he has been a curatorial consultant for the British Museum, British Library, and Tate Gallery. The Sabin Award for Comics Scholarship is awarded annually at the International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference.
KALERVO SINERVO holds a degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University, where he wrote his thesis on the transmedial intersections of fandom, video games, and Gotham City. He served for two terms as the Communications Vice President for the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics and has written broadly on comics as a form and culture, including a chapter (cowritten with Darren Wershler) on Marvel’s early digital strategies for Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe (2017) and an article on comics piracy for Amodern (cowritten with Wershler and Shannon Tien, 2013). In 2019, he began a Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary. Find him online @kalervideo and at badpanels.com.
MARC SINGER is professor of English at Howard University in Washington, DC. He is the author of Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies (2018) and Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics (2012), and is the coeditor, with Nels Pearson, of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (2009).
THERESA TENSUAN, dean of Diversity, Access, and Community Engagement and director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs at Haverford College, works to foster connections among diversity, academic excellence, and community engagement. As a teacher and scholar, she focuses on autobiography, visual culture studies, and critical discourses around race and gender. She has published essays in Biography and in Transforming the Academy: Faculty Perspectives on Diversity and Pedagogy (edited by Sarah Willie-LeBreton, 2016), and she coedited, with Cynthia Dobbs and Daphne Lamothe, a special issue of Biography on “Life Stories from the Creole City” (2012).
SHANNON TIEN holds an MA in English from Concordia University and is currently the inbound marketing lead at Hootsuite, where she runs the world’s number-one educational blog on social media marketing. She teaches search engine optimization and best practices in web writing to traditionally trained writers and helps organizations of all sizes build their own lead-generating online publications. Her cultural criticism and essays have appeared in the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Believer, and more.
DARREN WERSHLER holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature, and is the cofounder of the Media History Research Centre and the director of the Residual Media Depot. He is currently writing The Lab Book: Situated Practice in Media Studies, with Jussi Parikka and Lori Emerson.
GILLIAN WHITLOCK is emeritus professor of English in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is author of The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (2000), Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (2006), and Postcolonial Life Narrative: Testimonial Transactions (2015), as well as numerous chapters and articles on life writing. Her current research project on “The Testimony of Things” focuses on the literature and arts of the asylum-seeker camps in the Pacific.
BENJAMIN WOO is associate professor of communication and media studies at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) and director of the Comic Cons Research Project (comicconsproject.org). His research examines contemporary geek media cultures and the production, circulation, and reception of comic books and graphic novels. He is the author of Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture (2018), coauthor (with Bart Beaty) of The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books (2016), and coeditor (with Stuart R. Poyntz and Jamie Rennie) of Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective (2016).
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Individual chapters copyright © 2020 in the names of their authors.
This website maintained by Charles Hatfield.
Individual chapters copyright © 2020 in the names of their authors.
This website maintained by Charles Hatfield.
