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)
- Secretary: Maite Urcaregui (San José State University)
- Treasurer: Justin Wigard (University of North Dakota)
- Fundraiser: Brianna Anderson (University of Texas at El Paso)
- Members-at-large:
- Arturo Meijide Lapido (St. Ambrose University)
- Margaret Galvan (University of Florida)
- Fernanda Díaz-Basteris (Ohio State University)
- Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero (University of California, Davis)
Member Bios:
Brittany Tullis is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and 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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Brianna Anderson is an Assistant Professor of English Education at the University of Texas at El Paso. She received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida and an M.A. in English from the University of Kentucky. Her research analyzes representations of social issues and youth activism in children’s literature, comics, and zines, with a particular emphasis on youth-made texts. Her research has recently appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature in Education, Girlhood Studies, and Gothic Nature. She's also the creator of the Environmental Comics Database, a digital humanities project.
Fernanda Díaz-Basteris is an interdisciplinary scholar with joint appointments in Latinx and Caribbean Studies (Department of Spanish and Portuguese) and Latinx Studies (Center for Ethnic Studies) at Ohio State University. She teaches courses on Caribbean narratives, Latinx cinema, Latinx comics and disaster, and the Latinx Studies minor’s introductory course. Her research explores visual storytelling, especially comics and webcomics, in relation to displacement, femicide, Latinx migrations, and post-disaster urban geographies. She is the co-editor of Latinx Comics Studies (Rutgers University Press, 2025) and has published in leading journals including CENTRO, Studies in Comics, A|B: Auto/Biography Studies, and AMATL COMIX. Dr. Díaz-Basteris serves on the boards of several comics studies organizations across Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. She also leads outreach initiatives like the Latina Book Club in Columbus Metropolitan Public Libraries and the Latinx Feminist Comics Research Cluster at the OSU-FREE Center. She is currently Vice-Chair of the Columbus City Commission for Immigrants and Refugees Affairs.
Margaret Galvan is Associate 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 an award-winning first book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s (2023). She is writing a second book about how communities of LGBTQ+ cartoonists in the 1980s and 1990s innovated comics, which has been supported by fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, Andy Warhol Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities. Her publications on comics in social movements can be found in journals like American Literature, Archive Journal, Australian Feminist Studies, Feminist Formations, iNKS, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Radical History Review, and WSQ. See margaretgalvan.org for more information.
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.
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.
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.
Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at the University of California, Davis, where she is also affiliate faculty with the Performance Studies and Cultural Studies programs. She earned her PhD in English with specializations in Film Studies and Latinx Studies from The Ohio State University in 2023. Her research historicizes Hollywood’s formation of the Latina star in the twentieth century and traces how legacy star marketing informs Latina social media influencers’ digital self-mediation in the twenty-first century. Her publications on Latine/x new media and U.S. popular culture can be found in the journals Girlhood Studies and Label Me Latino/a, as well as in edited collections like Latinx Comics Studies (Rutgers UP, 2025), and TikTok Cultures in the United States (Routledge, 2022). She also serves as the Social Strategist for the Comics Studies Society and the Co-Coordinator of Programming and Marketing for The Latinx Comic Arts Festival.
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.
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.