Michael J. Berntsen is an assistant professor in the English, Theatre, and World Languages department of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. His greatest accomplishments include completing the Boston Marathon in 4 ½ hours, beating the Outer Banks Rooster Challenge, and teaching his 80-year-old mother how to use streaming services. His works can be found in collections and journals, including The MLA Style Center, Teaching Shakespeare, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, The Wider World of Jim Henson, Untoward Magazine, St. Sebastian Review, and Media, Technology, and the Imagination.
Ashley Ecklund is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at the University of Oregon. Her dissertation asks how late-twentieth century literature takes up catastrophic violence in everyday urban settings. She is interested in Derridean Materialisms, Black Feminisms, and Theories of Affect for the ways in which they can underscore differences and multiplicities alongside connections in terms of knowing and telling narratives of violence.
Emily Hunsaker is earning her PhD in English at the University of Florida. Her work focuses on children’s literature and comics studies. She also teaches English and writing courses at the University of Florida emphasizing visual and multimodal literacy.
Shawn Gilmore is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and writes on comics, prose, film, and the like, teaching the same. He has written and presented on comics since the mid-2000s, completing a dissertation on how the graphic novel became a viable conceptual and publication format in 2013 and publishing articles and reviews in a variety of collections, journals, and in various public fora. In addition, he is the editor of The Vault of Culture, a public scholarship site that features work by a range of scholars and lay writers over a variety of cultural objects, from comics to film to novels to video games and everything in between.
Seamus O’Malley is Associate Professor of English at Stern College for Women, Yeshiva University. He is the author of Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Irish Culture and ‘The People’: Populism and its Discontents (Oxford University Press, 2022). He has co-edited three volumes, one of essays on Ford Madox Ford and America (Rodopi, 2010), a research companion to Ford (Routledge, 2018) and a volume of essays on the cartoonists Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell (Mississippi, 2018). He is the chair of the Ford Madox Ford Society and co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar for Irish Studies.
Logan Schell is a PhD student at the University of Florida. His interests are in Comics Studies and Rhetoric and Composition. He has written academic work for the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics as well as the Oxford University Press. When he is not teaching or researching them, he self-publishes comics, both online and in print.
Nao Tomabechi has studied and taught in three countries: Japan, America, and Germany. They majored in English literature in Sophia University, Japan, where they received their BA and MA. They received their second MA in American studies from Heidelberg University, Germany. They recently completed their PhD at the University of Siegen, Germany, with a dissertation focusing on supervillains in American superhero comics. They will start teaching English and American Literature in Shujitsu University, Japan in April 2023.
Yi Wang obtained her bachelor’s degree in English Education at Shanghai International Studies University and an MPhil in Education (Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature) at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests revolve around Interdisciplinary research in children’s literature and young adult fiction. She is currently invested in comics and picturebooks study, and is interested in how comics and picturebooks visualise identity conflicts of children and young adults.