Jörn Ahrens
Jörn Ahrens is Professor of Cultural Sociology, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, since 2011 & Extraordinary Professor in Social Anthropology, North West University, South Africa, since 2018. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Free University Berlin (1999) and a habilitation from Humboldt University, Berlin (2006). His core fields of research are violence, culture, and society; popular media and culture; nature and society; theory of culture. He is the author of Überzeichnete Spektakel. Inszenierungen von Gewalt im Comic (Baden-Baden 2019: Nomos), co-editor with A. Meteling of Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture, and Sequence (New York 2010: Continuum) and various other articles and book chapters dealing with comics, popular culture, and other subjects.
Tilmann Altenberg
Tilmann Altenberg is Reader in Hispanic Studies at Cardiff University (Wales, UK). He holds a doctorate in Hispanic literature from the University of Hamburg. His areas of research include Spanish-language literature and comics, as well as the cultural and intellectual history of the Hispanic World. He has published widely on the work of Spanish and Latin American authors, among them José María Heredia, Juan Valera, Alejo Carpentier, Nicanor Parra, and Roberto Bolaño. Part of his current research explores representations of the Falklands War. He is the founding-director of Cardiff University’s Santander Collection of Hispanic Comics and Graphic Literature.
Ofer Ashkenazi
Ofer Ashkenazi is the Director of the Richard Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications include two monographs on Weimar cinema, as well as articles on German Heimat-culture, exile photography, Jewish life under Nazism, and the transnational antiwar movement of the interwar years.
Dieter Declercq
Dr. Dieter Declercq is Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of Kent. He has a broad interest in popular media, with a specific focus on satire, comedy, irony, cartoons, comics and graphic novels, animation, and, more recently, memes and video games. His approach combines methodologies from Film Studies, Media Studies and Philosophy of Art in the analytic tradition. He is currently working on a monograph about Satire, Comedy, and Mental Health (Emerald 2020).
Jakob F. Dittmar
Jakob F. Dittmar was made Associate Professor for his research into comics and en-passant-media by the Institute of Technology, Berlin (TU Berlin) and by Malmö University. His perspective on comics combines interests in Science of Arts, Media and Communication and Cultural Studies.
Nina Mickwitz
Nina Mickwitz works as Lecturer in Contextual and Critical Studies at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. She is the author of Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-telling in a Skeptical Age (Palgrave 2016), and has more recently co-edited two volumes with Ian Hague and Ian Horton, Contexts of Violence in Comics and Representing Acts of Violence in Comics (Routledge 2019). Other contributions include a chapter in the forthcoming collection Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America, edited by James Scorer (UCL Press 2019), a chapter on comics as refugee advocacy in Documenting Trauma, edited by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind (Palgrave 2019) and a Forum piece in the forthcoming special issue of the journal Auto/Biography edited by Candida Rifkind, Eleanor Ty, and Nima Naghibi. Nina is a founding member of the Comics Research Hub at University of the Arts London.
Hans-Martin Rall
Hans-Martin Rall is a tenured Associate Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University Singapore and the Coordinator of the Digital Animation area. He is also a successful director of independent animated short films. His films, primarily animated adaptations of classic literature, have been shown in over 650 film-festivals worldwide and won 70 international awards. His books Animation: From Concept to Production (2017) and Adaptation for Animation: Transforming Literature Frame by Frame (2019) were published by CRC Press (Taylor & Francis).
Laura Schlichting
Laura Schlichting holds a Master’s Degree in English Literary and Cultural Studies from Justus Liebig University Giessen. She has written her Master Thesis on the forms and functions of photography in graphic novels under the supervision of Prof. Ansgar Nünning. Since then, she has been a PhD-candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) as well as the International Ph.D. Programme (IPP). Her project examines the genre of comics journalism with special focus on the concept of the author, being entitled “Authorship in Comics Journalism” (working title). Her research interests also include intermediality and transmediality, journalism studies, photography, and picture books.
Johannes C. P. Schmid
Johannes C. P. Schmid is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Hamburg. He is the author of Shooting Pictures, Drawing Blood: The Photographic Image in the Graphic War Memoir (Bachmann 2016) for which he was presented with the 2015 American Studies Award of the University of Hamburg, as well as the 2016 Roland Faelske-Award for Comics and Animation Studies for the best master’s thesis. In his dissertation, Johannes discusses framing strategies in documentary comics. A list of his further publications can be found at www.johannesschmid.net.
Chiao-I Tseng
Chiao-I Tseng is Associate Researcher in the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Sciences, University of Bremen. She has been developing multimodal linguistic methods for analyzing audiovisual and graphic narratives, such as methods for cohesion, event types, narrative space and character motivations. Her publications include a monograph Cohesion in Film (2013, Palgrave MacMillan) and several international peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on empirical issues such as effects of new media on narrative comprehension, complex narratives, transmedia and genre comparisons, persuasion, empathy and social impact in multimodal and interactive storytelling.
Dirk Vanderbeke
Dirk Vanderbeke is Professor of English Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. He also taught in Frankfurt, Milwaukee, Greifswald, Chester, PA, Stuttgart, Paderborn, and from 2007 to 2019 as a permanent guest professor in Zielona Góra. His doctoral thesis, Worüber man nicht sprechen kann (Whereof One Cannot Speak), explored the unrepresentable in philosophy, science and literature. His habilitation study, Theoretische Welten und literarische Transformationen (Theoretical Worlds and Literary Transformations) examined the ‘science wars’ and the debate on the role(s) of science in contemporary literature. He has published on a variety of topics, e.g. science and literature, evolutionary criticism, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, John Milton, science fiction and fantasy, vampires, and comics and graphic novels.
Wibke Weber
Wibke Weber (Ph.D.) is Professor of Media Linguistics at ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Her areas of research are visual semiotics, digital storytelling, multimodal discourse analysis, comics journalism, data visualizations and infographics, and augmented and virtual reality. From 2001 to 2013 she worked as a Professor of Information Design at Stuttgart Media University (Germany). For a publication list and current research projects see: www.zhaw.ch/en/about-us/person/webw/
Lukas R.A. Wilde
Dr. Lukas R.A. Wilde is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Tübingen’s Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 923 “Threatened Order—Societies under Stress”. He studied theater and media studies, Japanese studies, and philosophy at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Gakugei University of Tokyo, and was a fellow of the German National Scholarship Foundation. His dissertation investigated the communicative functions of ‘characters’ (kyara) within contemporary Japanese society. His main areas of interest are visual communication, picture and media theory, webcomics and digital comics. In the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) he is the executive board’s treasurer, as well as one of the spokespersons of the Committee for Comics Studies (AG Comicforschung) of the German Society of Media Studies (GfM). A list of publications can be found at http://lukasrawilde.de/en/. Lukas Wilde was awarded the Roland-Faelske-Prize in 2018 for the best dissertation in Comics and Animation Studies.