Charles Acheson
Charles Acheson is a graduate of the Tennessee Technological University English Master’s Program and a composition instructor at TTU.
Brian Bates
Brian Bates teaches and researches in the fields of British Romanticism, book history, performance studies, and visual cultures. His first book—Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception—examines how Wordsworth used prefaces, footnotes, endnotes, head notes, and advertisements to guide early 19th-century readers through his poems and convince them of the national importance of his poetry in the midst of widespread negative reviews and parodic attacks. Currently, he is working on an article about John Keats and early 19th-century pantomime, as well as a series of essays about the graphic and digital legacies of British Romanticism in 21st-century culture.
Carolyn Cocca
Carolyn Cocca is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Economics, and Law at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury. She is the author of Jailbait: The Politics of Statutory Rape Laws in the United States (SUNY Press), and most recently, of “The Brokeback Project: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Portrayals of Women in Mainstream Superhero Comics, 1993-2013” in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and “Negotiating the Third Wave of Feminism in Wonder Woman” in PS: Political Science and Politics.
Monalesia Earle
Monalesia Earle is a Ph.D. student in the English and Humanities Department at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research draws on both the subversive and structural elements of comics/graphic narratives as a way to contextualize and inform her queer(ed) (of colour) readings of contemporary fiction. She holds an MSSW in Social Work from Columbia University, as well as an MA in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture from Birkbeck, University of London.
Sergio C. Figueiredo
Sergio C. Figueiredo is an Assistant Professor of Social/Digital Media at Kennesaw State University (GA), where he currently teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in media histories and rhetorics (print, digital, and material), writing studies, professional communication, visual design and composition, and public/civic engagement. Before joining KSU’s Department of English in 2012, Sergio served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Miami University (OH) following the completion of his doctoral work in 2011 in Clemson University’s Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design program.
Chris Gavaler
Chris Gavaler is an Assistant Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where he teaches a seminar on superheroes. His recent scholarship on the genre appears in The Journal of American Culture, PS: Political Science & Politics, The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and online at HoodedUtilitarian.com and his site, thepatronsaintofsuperheroes.wordpress.com. His book-length study, On the Origin of Superheroes: From the Big Bang to Action Comics No.1, is under contract from University of Iowa Press.
Christopher J. Hayton
Dr. Christopher J. Hayton works in crisis intervention as a social worker, and part time in higher education for Florida State University College of Social Work. His interests in comic scholarship focus on social history in comics, especially involving minority representations, gender in comics, and Asian culture in comic books. His conference presentations and published material reflect an interdisciplinary, analytical approach to research in comic studies from a social sciences perspective.
Michael L. Kersulov
Michael L. Kersulov is a doctoral student in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. While teaching high school English in Missouri he became interested in how visual literacy and digital tools can empower students. His current research focuses on the use of comics and other graphic literature in secondary education, digital media to promote literacy, and teacher education.
Orion Ussner Kidder
Dr. Orion Ussner Kidder is an Adjunct Professor of English at Simon Fraser University and Fairleigh Dickinson University. He specializes in comics and popular culture as well as Shakespeare and film. He most recently published “Self-Conscious Sexuality in Promethea” in Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore. He lives in Vancouver, Canada, with his wife and their cat.
Robin Alex McDonald
Robin Alex McDonald is a writer, independent curator, and academic in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University. Their scholarly interests span queer theory, feminist theory, theories of collectivity and “being-with,” affect and emotion, drawing and illustration, and collaborative forms of queer and trans* artistic and cultural productions.
Annamarie O’Brien
Annamarie O’Brien is an American Studies doctoral student at Penn State University Harrisburg, interested in the intersections of popular culture, visual culture, new media, and gender. She received her B.A. with High Honors from University of Michigan in 2010 in Arts & Ideas in the Humanities and her M.A. in Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. Her Master’s thesis, entitled “Mind Over Matter: Expressions of Mind/Body Dualism in Thinspiration,” examines attitudes toward the body in online pro-eating disorder imagery. She has published a chapter on the performance and consumption of Japanese femininity online in Popular Culture in the 21st Century, and has presented her work at various conferences including San Diego International Comic-Con, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, the Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies, and Graphicity in Montreal.
Cara Takakjian
Cara’s primary research and teaching interests are Italian popular culture, youth culture, and the relationship between text and image. She has published works on text-image relations with regards to photography in Italian novels, futurist poetry, and comics. She has also written on the use of sound in ethnographic film and on Italian immigrant documentary film. Cara received her BA from Georgetown University and her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bucknell University.
Editors of this issue
Jeffrey A. Brown
Jeffrey A. Brown is a Professor in the Department of Popular Culture and the School of Critical and Cultural Studies at Bowling Green State University. Brown is the author of numerous academic articles about gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in contemporary media, as well as three books from the University Press of Mississippi: Black Superheroes: Milestone Comics and Their Fans (2000), Dangerous Curves: Gender, Fetishism and the Modern Action Heroine (2011), and Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture (2015). He is currently completing a book about live action superheroes in post-9/11 American culture, The Modern Superhero in Film and Television, for Routledge Press.
Melissa Loucks
Melissa Loucks is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on comic strips and political cartoons of the long civil rights period. Mel organized the 2014 UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, and she is currently serving as Co-Managing Editor at ImageTexT.