Note on Contributors

Laken Brooks

Laken Brooks is a PhD English student at the University of Florida where she studies digital humanities, folk traditions of the hearth and farm, communication technologies, and disability. She is primarily interested in how reading is a dynamic, multimodal experience that invites a reader to use the book’s materiality, the land, the home, and all the reader’s bodily senses to make meaning. Before coming to the University of Florida, Brooks served as a Fulbright ETA grantee in the English Department at the University of Szczecin, Poland, and a Scholar-in-Residence for the nonprofit iGIANT (Impact of Gender and Sex on Innovation and Novel Technologies). She is from rural Appalachia, and the traditional arts, remedies, and oral storytelling practices of this region inspire her research. Now, Brooks specializes in digital storytelling with museums, national publications, and educational nonprofit organizations such as the National Park Service and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Readers can find her freelance writing in CNN, Atlas Obscura, Good Housekeeping, Farmer-ish, Forbes, and in other publications.

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

Jason Kahler earned his PhD in Composition and Rhetoric from Wayne State University. His research focuses on the teaching of writing and popular culture, comic books in particular. His chapter in the SeqArt book How to Analyze and Review Comics will appear later this year. Dr. Kahler has recently presented at the Northeast Popular Culture Association conference, and placed poems in Analog and The MacGuffin. His website, www.jasonkahler.com, updates occasionally, and you can join him on Twitter @JasonKahler3. He teaches and writes from his home in Michigan.

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.

Fi Stewart-Taylor

Fi Stewart-Taylor is a PhD Student at the University of Florida, interested in self-published comics and zines, queer texts and networks, and communities.