ICAF Executive Committee
- ICAF Chair: Brittany Tullis (St. Ambrose University)
- Academic Director: Elizabeth Nijdam (University of British Columbia)
- Program Director: Joshua Abraham Kopin (University of Texas)
- Promotions Coordinator: Kay Sohini (Comics artist)
- Secretary: Maite Urcaregui (San José State University)
- Treasurer: Justin Wigard (University of Richmond)
- Fundraiser: Qiana Whitted (University of South Carolina)
- Members-at-large:
- Arturo Meijide Lapido (St. Ambrose University)
- Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado (Baruch College, CUNY)
- Margaret Galvan (University of Florida)
- Andrew Kunka (University of South Carolina Sumter)
Member Bios:
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Margaret Galvan is Assistant Professor of Visual Rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. Her archivally-informed research examines how visual culture operates within social movements and includes a first book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s, forthcoming this fall with University of Minnesota Press. In 2021-2022, she was in residence at the Stanford Humanities Center as the Distinguished Junior External Fellow researching a second book about how communities of LGBTQ cartoonists innovated comics through grassroots formats. Her publications on comics in social movements can be found in journals like American Literature, Archive Journal, Australian Feminist Studies, iNKS, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and WSQ. See margaretgalvan.org for more information.
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Joshua Abraham Kopin received his PhD in 2020 from the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, with a dissertation that frames comics as a nineteenth century technology of time and space. He received a 2018-2019 Swann Fellowship at the Library of Congress and his work has appeared in American Literature, INKS, and is forthcoming in Keywords For Comics Studies. From 2017-2019 he was the President of the Comics Studies Society Graduate Student Caucus.
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Andrew J. Kunka is Professor of English and Division Chair at the University of South Carolina Sumter. His research focuses on the publishers Dell and Gold Key comics and their neglected significance in comics history. He is the author of Autobiographical Comics (2018) from the Bloomsbury Comics Studies Series, and he edited the collection May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern (2006) for Routledge. In addition to writing about autobiography, he has also published on Will Eisner, Kyle Baker, Jack Katz, Doug Moench, comics noir, and race and comics. He is currently the book review editor for Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, and he co-founded the podcast The Comics Alternative.
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Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado is an Assistant Professor of Latinx Literature in the English department, and affiliated faculty in the Black and Latinx Studies Department at Baruch College, CUNY. Her research interests include Latinx culture & literature, U.S. cultural production, graphic novels, and women of color feminist theories. Her current book project is the first study of Latinx graphic memoirs and comic biographies. Currently, she has an essay on queer Cuban girlhood in the graphic memoir Spit and Passion in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies and has a forthcoming article on the comic Undocumented: A Worker’s Fight, about the twin skin issue of labor and immigration in the United States. She has organized panels on comics studies both nationally and internationally. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark.
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Arturo Meijide Lapido is Assistant Professor of Spanish at St. Ambrose University. His research deals with Spanish films, comics, and popular culture, with an emphasis on texts that engage with conceptions of Galician culture and identity. Arturo’s recent work has revolved primarily around Galician author Miguelanxo Prando, and his representation of Atlanticism. His other primary research area is the presentation of violence in Spanish popular culture. Arturo’s work in this area has been published in venues such as Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos and Procedings of the Cine-Lit Conference.
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Elizabeth "Biz" Nijdam is Assistant Professor in German Studies in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She graduated from the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2017. Biz’s current book project, Panelled Pasts: History, Media and Memory in the German Graphic Novel (under contract with Ohio State University Press), examines how comics have become an important form for popular investigations of East German experience. Analyzing twelve graphic novels and webcomics thematizing life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), this project evaluates how the comics medium negotiates the divide between history and memory at the intersection of text and image. In addition to founding the University of Michigan’s first comics studies working group, the Transnational Comics Studies Workshop, Biz is President of the Executive Board of the Comics Studies Society's Graduate Student Caucus. Her recent publications include articles in The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, ImageText, World Literature Today and International Journal of Comic Art, and chapters in the edited volume Class, Please Open Your Comics (2015) and the forthcoming books Comics of the New Europe: Intersections and Reflections with University of Leuven Press and Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook with Liverpool University Press.
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Kay Sohini is a researcher, writer, and comics maker based in New York. She has a PhD from Stony Brook University, where she drew her doctoral dissertation, "Drawing Unbelonging," as a comic. The project was supported by a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Society. In both her creative and academic work, Kay focuses on how comics can be utilized by scholars and artists alike in healthcare justice, in environmental humanities, in resisting disinformation, and in espousing an equitable future for all. Her work has been published in The Nib, Graphic Mundi’s Covid Chronicles, Inside Higher Ed, and de Gruyter, among others.
She is currently working on her debut graphic memoir UNBELONGING, to be published by Penn State University Press in 2023. |
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Brittany Tullis is Associate Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies at St. Ambrose University, where she teaches classes on Latin/x American and international feminist comics in both English and Spanish. Her published work appears in Hispanic Issues On Line, the International Journal of Comic Art, Comics Studies: Here and Now!, and her co-edited Eisner award-nominated collection, Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics. Brittany is currently co-editing a special issue on Latin/x American comics for Mitologías hoy:Revista de pensamiento, crítica y estudios literarios latinoamericanos, due for publication in December of 2019. She also serves as the Second Vice President of the Comics Studies Society.
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Maite Urcaregui (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature at San José State University. She received her Ph.D. in English with doctoral emphases in Black Studies and Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2022. Her research and teaching explore Latinx and multiethnic U.S. literatures, visual cultures, and comics through feminist queer, and critical race theories and histories. In collaboration with Fernanda Díaz-Basteris, Maite is currently co-editing a volume, currently under contract with Rutgers University Press, that explores the intersections of Latinx studies and comics studies. Her publications have been featured or are forthcoming in Angelaki, The Black Scholar, The International Journal of Comic Art, The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Prose Studies, and Studies in Comics as well as several edited volumes.
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Qiana Whitted is Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. A graduate of Hampton University with a PhD from Yale University, her research focuses on African American literary and cultural studies, and American comics and graphic novels. She is the author of Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, the Eisner award-winning EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest, and co-editor of the essay collection on Comics and the U.S. South. She is also editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society and has taught courses on graphic novels as a visiting professor abroad at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil. At her first ICAF in 2009, she presented a paper on Swamp Thing.
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Justin Wigard (“Why-Guard”) is Assistant Professor of English at University of North Dakota, where he works and teaches in comics studies and digital humanities. He publishes widely on comics in venues such as INKS, Graphic Medicine Review, Genealogy, KULA, Cultural Analytics, and in various edited collections. His current project, Turok: Indigenous Futurisms (under contract with University Press of Mississippi) looks at the long history of the Indigenous comics character, Turok. He further explores the use of digital humanities to assist studies of American cartoonists, and particularly specializes in the work of Bill Watterson. Outside of comics, he recently co-edited Attack of the New B Movies: Essays on Syfy Channel's Original Films (McFarland 2023) with Mitch Ploskonka, the first academic treatment of SYFY’s 525 original films released from 1992-2002.
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