Ali Benice
Ali Benice has studied product design for his bachelor’s degree in Marmara University and is currently a Ph.D. student in Istanbul Arel University, in the field of graphics design. His MA thesis was on the topic of comic book adaptations of children’s books. He is currently working as a freelancer illustrator, writer, and translator.
Kevin Cooley
Kevin Cooley is a graduate teacher of record in the English Department at the University of Florida, where he studies animation, posthumanism, and queer theory. He received his B.A. and M.A. in English from St. Bonaventure University. He is the reviews editor for ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, and the Vice President of the University of Florida Graduate Comics Organization. His academic work is featured or forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity, Horror Studies, Studies in Comics, The Lion and The Unicorn,and through Bloomsbury Publishing.
Jennifer Daniels Klug
Jennifer Daniels Klug is pursuing a Masters Degree in English from Grand Valley State University. Her undergraduate degree is also from Grand Valley State University. She is working on a thesis about truth and performance in the plays of Tennessee Williams, and is currently working on a memoir with her brother.
Eike Exner
Originally from Germany, Eike Exner holds a BA in Literature from Harvard, recently completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, and currently works as a translator and independent researcher. When he began writing on comics history, he was astonished by the paucity of research on the emergence of ‘audiovisual’ comics (other than The Yellow Kid and His Phonograph), and hopes that the present article will contribute to a more complete understanding of this crucial period. Exner’s work on how the transdiegetic model made it to Japan can be found in the International Journal of Comic Art and the forthcoming anthology The Comics World: Comics, Graphic Novels and their Publics. He is also looking for a publisher for a book manuscript on the subject, titled When Krazy Kat Spoke Japanese: Early American Comics and the Genesis of Modern Manga.
Fiona Farnsworth
Fiona Farnsworth is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She pursued her academic interest in comics narratives within her master’s thesis, examining testimony in Joe Sacco’s Palestine narratives. Fiona’s doctoral research focuses on literary representations of food in contemporary West African women’s writing in the United States, locating this work within intersecting critical discourses of gender, gastronomy, and immigrant identity.
Rachel Kunert-Graf
Rachel Kunert-Graf holds a PhD in English, with a certificate in Film and Media Studies, from the University of Washington. She has taught courses in writing, literature and cultural studies at the UW, Université Paul-Valery, Shoreline Community College and Antioch University. Her dissertation addresses representations of historical persecution in graphic narrative. Interest in the ways cultural texts, including literature, film and other media can confirm and/or challenge systemic oppression motivates her scholarship and her teaching.
Christopher Lopez
Christopher Lopez is first and foremost a husband to Carly Lopez his partner in all things creative and justice-oriented. He is also a filmmaker and a film critic for digital media outlet Reel Spirituality and RELEVANT Magazine. He is based in Los Angeles, CA where he earned a master’s in Religion and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. When he isn’t writing film reviews and covering major film festivals and comic book conventions, he’s leading film and book clubs oriented around superhero narratives or using comic book characters to inform various social justice groups he is a part of. He has written several main feature articles for Reel Spirituality which explore the cultural and ethical significance of Superhero comic-book stories. He is currently co-producing a short documentary on Puerto Rican identities called La Visita: A Family’s Privilege.
Kodi Maier
Kodi Maier is a PhD candidate at the University of Hull. Their doctoral thesis, “Dream Big, Little Princess: Interrogating the Disney Princess Franchise from 2000 to the Present Day”, investigates the evolution of the Disney Princess franchise and its impact on female gender roles in the United States. Other research interests include fan studies, queer studies, and comics. Their most recent publication, “Camping Outside the Magic Kingdom’s Gates: The Power of Femslash in the Disney Fandom”, published in Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, discusses how the Disney femslash fandom manipulates Disney animated texts to create their own queer fairy tales.
Daniel Pinti
Daniel Pinti is professor of English at Niagara University, where he teaches comics as well as medieval literature and the Bible as literature. In addition to a forthcoming article on the Fraction/Aja run on Marvel’s Hawkeye, his recent publications include articles on Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and illustrated versions of Beowulf for younger readers. He is currently researching and writing on the comics of Jeff Lemire, and completing an essay on Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta’s The Vision. This article for ImageTexT is part of his ongoing work on Bakhtinian approaches to comics.
Jesse Ritchie
Jesse Ritchie is a PhD Candidate in English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His dissertation focuses on an affective reading of the literature of nuclear anxiety in the United States during the Cold War to explore the ways in which that literature works, along with other media, political, and cultural forces to manage, represent, respond to, and critique nuclear anxiety and the Cold War culture that sprang up around it. His other interests include Comics Studies and the figure of the superhero; Science Fiction Studies with an emphasis on exploring dystopian and postapocalyptic works; and studying cultural and personal anxiety in literature. He is free to a good tenure track adjacent home.
Nicolas Schillinger
Nicolas Schillinger is lecturer at the Institute of China Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He received his PhD in History from the University of Heidelberg, where he was also member of the interdisciplinary research cluster Asia and Europe in a Global Context. His teaching and research interests include the cultural and social history of nineteenth and twentieth century China, the history of gender and masculinity, military culture, and body history. His research also focuses on the representation of Chinese history and culture in comics and graphic novels. Nicolas’ book Body and Military Masculinity in late Qing and early Republican China. The Art of Governing Soldiers was published by Lexington (Rowman&Littfefield Publishers) in 2016. His article Other Myths. History, Trauma, and Nation in Boxers and Saints will appear in the collected volume History and Myths in Comics and Graphic Novels (in German, Berlin: Bachman).
Matthew Schmalzer
Matthew Schmalzer holds an MA in literature from Ball State University and is a doctoral student in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at North Carolina State University. His research focuses on rhetoric in multimodal media, particularly comics and videogames, and also investigates the discourse of competitive videogame fan communities.
Will Simpson
Will Simpson is currently teaching, while in his doctoral candidacy in Comparative Humanities at the University of Louisville. He holds an M.A. in Religious Studies and B.A.’s in Philosophy and Religious Studies from Western Kentucky University. Will has published articles in The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, and the Journal of Religion and Society. In 2012, Will worked as an assistant to the editor at the International Journal of Religion and Sport. Will’s academic interests include the study of comics and graphic narratives, esoteric religiosity, transcendent and religious experiences, philosophy of mind, and psychology of religion.
Anastasia Ulanowicz
Anastasia Ulanowicz is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, as well as general editor of ImageTexT. Her research is primarily focused on the representation of intergenerational relationships and memory in children’s literature and graphic narratives. Her first book, Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost Images(Routledge, 2013) received the Children’s Literature Association Book Award in 2015. She is also the co-editor (with Manisha Basu, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) of The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger (Palgrave, 2018), which includes her essay on representations of embodied memory and childhood games in Oksana Zabushko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets. She is currently collaborating with Marek Oziewicz (University of Minnesota) on a book on the emerging genre of “Bloodlands fiction” in global children’s literature, and she is also developing a book project on representations of post-1989 Eastern Europe in comics and graphic narratives. In addition to these accomplishments, she is the book reviews co-editor of The Lion and the Unicorn. Her most recent essays appear in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Filoteknos and Miscellanea Posttotalitariana Wratislaviensia. She is a member of the Children’s Literature Association, the International Research Society for Children’s Literature, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.