Laken Brooks
Rachel Hartnett
Rachel Hartnett is a Ph.D. student at the University of Florida. Her dissertation is titled “Base Camp Literature: US Structures of Exploitation and Settler Colonialism” and will focus on texts written by native and indigenous writers living in spaces occupied by the U.S. military, specifically Hawai’i, Okinawa, and Trinidad. She earned her M.A. in English in 2016 from Florida Atlantic University. Her thesis focused on postcolonial resistance and reinforcement in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series and was titled: “Mhysa or Monster: Masculinization, Mimicry, and the White Savior in A Song of Ice and Fire.” She currently serves as the Program Coordinator for the PODEMOS Initiative through Hispanic/Lantinx Affairs, the Health Care Chair for UF’s Graduate Assistants United, and an Editorial Board Member of the UF Journal of Undergraduate Research. She was also awarded a 2021-2022 Library Enhancement Grant for “Collection Enhancement in Indigenous Studies” through UF’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere. Her article, “‘The Silver Queen’: U.S. Imperialism and A Song of Ice and Fire” is in production with the Journal of Popular Culture.
Tiffany Hong
Dr. Tiffany Hong is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Earlham College. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures (Japanese) from the University of California, Irvine. Currently, she is working on a monograph which examines the narratology of Murakami Haruki through the visual rhetoric of sequential art studies. Her work has appeared in The Supervillain Reader, Image [&] Narrative, Room One Thousand (UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design), and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
Jason Kahler
Kenneth Oravetz
Kenneth Oravetz is a Ph.D. Candidate and Instructor at Northeastern University. His research focuses on contemporary art comics and graphic novels and their hybrid digital-analog bibliographic networks. His work strives to provide critical insights into the fields of format and materiality, critical bibliography, visual culture, comics studies, and capital and cultural aesthetics in the digital era. Kenneth’s research interests extend to comics and/as material rhetoric, interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary applications of comics studies theory, digital approaches to book history, and developing inclusive and forward-thinking academic and artistic communities. Kenneth is the chair and founder of the Boston Comics Studies Group, a multi-university group of faculty, staff, and graduate students devoted to engaging with current issues in comics and comics studies. He is also the Assistant Director of the Letterpress Goes 3D digital modeling project, which seeks to use 3D printing and laser cutting technology to reverse engineer historical woodcuts whose original printing blocks are inaccessible for hands-on pedagogical, research, and artistic use. Kenneth has presented work at the American Contemporary Literature Association, the Northeast Modern Language Association, the International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference, the International Comic Arts Forum, and conferences of the Comics Studies Society, among others. Kenneth is a contributor to Bubbles fanzine, and he regularly posts comic art from his collection at the Instagram account @comic_ken.