ICAF Welcomes New Executive Committee Members
Posted July 1, 2019
The International Comic Arts Forum is pleased to announce the addition of three new members to the Executive Committee: Emily Decker-Bess, Andrew Kunka, and Kay Sohini. Members of the ICAF Executive Committee work together to organize programming and speakers, fundraise, and promote the academic conference. Many thanks to retiring members, Brannon Costello and Andréa Gilroy, for their service on the committee! Bios for all current Executive Committee members can be found here.
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Emily Decker-Bess graduated from Pratt Institute with double master’s degrees in Library Science and Art History with a thesis on women and comic art in 2014. She previously worked at Marvel and in academic libraries, and has written for online blogs including, The Rumpus. Decker-Bess has been on panels at Rutgers, C2E2, among others, and has given lectures at various schools and places like the Field Museum. She turned to Development in 2016 at the Field Museum, then moved to American Writers Museum in February 2019, but still continues to research and lecture on the feminist movement in comic art.
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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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Kay Sohini is a doctoral scholar and an illustrator based in New York. Her work seeks to examine how autobiographical/autoethnographical graphic narratives possess an openness to difference, that is often missing from normative models of discourse, and how this characteristic can be utilized (by artists and scholars alike) to represent marginalized voices and decolonize crip and queer spaces. She has presented her work and organized panels at the MLA (Modern Language Association), NeMLA, SALA (South Asian Literary Association) amongst others, and her work on graphic memoirs has been recently been published in Assay: A Journal of Non-fiction Studies. She is currently working on a chapter “Being and Belonging in Transnational Comics” for an edited collection, and a chapter on LGBTQ+ comics “The Queerness of Being” for the Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives to be published in late 2019. You can find more about her non-academic endeavors—including an upcoming webzine The Comics of Liminality that features young and diverse comic artists from around the world—at https://kaysohini.hcommons.org/
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