Laken Brooks
Laken Brooks is a PhD English student at the University of Florida where she studies folklore, digital humanities, composition and rhetoric. She is especially interested in folk remedies and Appalachian traditions. Brooks is also a freelance writer specializing in healthcare topics, and she has written about disability, LGBTQ+ identity, rural health access, and health technologies for outlets like CNN, Forbes, and Verywell Health.
Megan Fowler
Megan Fowler is an English PhD student at the University of Florida. Her research interests include Children’s Literature, Gender & Queer Studies, Critical Race Theory, Comics Studies Film & Media Studies. Her dissertation project deals with queer representation and trauma in contemporary media, young adult literature, and webcomics. She has given several paper presentations at conferences including MLA, SAMLA, and IGA. Megan’s publications include a number of published and upcoming essays, including “‘White Skin Was Never Specified’: Rewriting the School Story through Racebending in the Harry Potter and Raven Cycle Fandoms” in Transformative Works and Cultures and “Superman, Disguised as Mild-Mannered Clark Kent: Queerness, Jewish Masculinity, and the Superhero Alter Ego as Marginalized Other” in The Double in Art – 1840-2010.
Teppei Fukuda
Teppei Fukuda earned his M.A. in Japanese from Portland State University in 2020 (Master’s thesis: “Moonlit Nights and Seasons of Romance: Yosano Akiko’s Use of the Moon in Tangled Hair”). He will start his doctoral study at the University of Oregon in the Fall 2021. His research interests include Japanese poetry, manga, and the aesthetics of seasons in modern Japan.
Natsume Fusanosuke
Natsume Fusanosuke is Emeritus Professor in the Graduate Program of Cultural Studies in Corporeal and Visual Representation, Gakushūin University. His publications are too numerous to list here, but he is author and co-author of approximately twenty books on manga and manga scholarship, including Why Is Manga So Interesting? Its Grammar and Expression (Manga wa naze omoshiroi no ka: sono hyōgen to bunpō), Where Is Tezuka Osamu? (Tezuka Osamu wa doko ni iru), and New Challenges for the Field of Manga (Mangagaku e no chōsen). In addition to these achievements, in his career he has been a manga artist, manga columnist, television host for NHK’s public television shows on comics, and author of other books on Japanese culture, including Grandson of Sōseki (Sōseki no mago), which tells the story of his family and his connection to Japan’s great modern novelist Natsume Sōseki. In 1999, he was the recipient of the prestigious Tezuka Osamu Culture Award.
Jon Holt
Jon Holt is Professor of Japanese at Portland State University. His research interests include modern Japanese poetry, Japanese Buddhism, and manga. Recent publications include: “Ishii Takashi, Beyond 1979: Ero Gekiga Godfather, GARO Inheritor, or Shōjo Manga Artist” (International Journal of Comic Art, 2019), “X-Rated and Excessively Long: Ji-Amari in Hayashi Amari’s Tanka” (U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, 2018), and “Chocolate Revolutionary: Tawara Machi’s Rule-Breaking Tanka Verses” (Japanese Language and Literature, 2018). He has published translations of the poetry of Hayashi Amari (Asymptote web journal, 2015), Yamanokuchi Baku, and Mabuni Chōshin (Islands of Resistance: Japanese Literature from Okinawa, 2016).
Robin Lewy
Robin Lewy is the Director of Programming at the Rural Women’s Health Project. She has worked in health justice in Central America and the Southeastern United States for the past 30 years. As Director of Programming, she coordinates the RWHP’s Community Health Worker initiatives and the coordination of testimonial media projects. Lewy has an MA degree in Community Development and Popular Theatre from the Universities of Nebraska and Omaha.
Readers may find more information about the Rural Women’s Health Project and support the organization’s fotonovela efforts by visiting their website: https://www.rwhp.org/about.html
Dina A. Mahmoud
Dina A. Mahmoud is a PhD student in Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include studies of reception, memory, visuality and orality. Her project examines the impact of visual works of art and literature about civil conflicts in Lebanon, Sudan and South Sudan on their readers and/or viewers.
Jacob Murel
Jacob Murel is a PhD candidate at Northeastern University and former reviewer for The Comics Journal. He has previously published research on the use of markup language in comics criticism. His dissertation explores the role of digital technology, namely word vector models, in examining the circulation of knowledge in early modern print.