Binoy Bhushan Agarwal
Binoy Bhushan Agarwal is an Assistant Professor of English in the University of Delhi, India. He is a two-time recipient of the prestigious Charles Wallace India Trust Research Grant for visit to UK (2013 & 2018). His areas of research include popular culture, travel writings, cultural history and colonial India and has presented papers at various conferences in UK, USA and Europe. He has co-edited a two volume book on South Asia titled Sasian Journey.
Sara Deniz Akant
I am a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. I research 20th century poetics & critical pedagogies, with a focus on the intersections of race, gender & empire. I am also the author of a book of poems, Babette (2015), as well as Parades (2014) & Latronic Strag (2015). I’ve taught writing and poetry at Baruch, Medgar Evers, John Jay & (currently) Hunter College.
Sallwa Assarawie and Nina Teal
Nina Teal and Sallwa Assarawie are recent graduates of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Each currently holds a Master’s degree in English, specifically Rhetoric and Composition Studies. Nina focuses primarily on the field of Asian Studies while Sallwa prioritizes Near Eastern Studies. Both Nina and Sallwa share a rhetorical interests in visual, cultural, and post-colonial rhetorics that intersect within Japanese popular culture practices. In her free time, Sallwa enjoys drawing, reading manga, and playing videos games, while Nina enjoys writing creative fiction, reading manga and hanging out with friends at her local Starbucks.
Buddy Ávila
I am a third year Ph.D. student in the American Culture Studies program at Bowling Green State University where I teach HIST 2060: Modern U.S. History, work at the Browne Popular Culture Library, and serve as the president of the Cultural Studies Scholars Association. I received my MA in history from Northern Illinois University where I also earned graduate certificates in Museum Studies and Women’s Studies. I have worked in local history museums throughout the Chicagoland and northern Illinois areas including the Museums at Lisle Station Park where I was a curator and the Ellwood House Museum where I was the historic site caretaker.
Ryan Banfi
Ryan Banfi is a first-year Masters student at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is obsessed with the Criterion Collection and he tries to watch a movie a day, or at least one HBO episode. He is a voracious reader and a lover of Bazin, Bogost, and Manovich. Ryan wants to segue his studies into new media and begin to study videogames and viral media. When he is not reading academic work, or watching movies, you can find him watching the Washington State Cougars football team or at the USC gym.
Alexis Bedell
Alexis Bedell is a first year Graduate Teaching Assistant in Children’s Literature and co-president of the Children’s and Adolescent Literature Association at Kansas State University. She completed her Bachelor’s of Arts in English Studies at Illinois State University in December 2017. Her areas of interest include: picture book theory, genre theory, humor studies, parody, and postmodern literature. Her favorite picture books are A Die Hard Christmas, All My Friends Are Dead, K is For Knifeball, and The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Eventually, she hopes to earn her PhD in Children’s Literature or English Studies.
Amber Bessner
Amber Bessner is a senior English major with a history minor at Hiram College in Hiram, OH. Amber has a passion in pop culture, especially when it comes to film, television, and rock music. She participated in many leadership positions on campus and hopes to grow from those experience for her future. Amber aspires to pursue an MLIS (Masters in Library and Information Science) degree for a specialty in Film Librarianship or Young Adult Librarianship after finishing her undergraduate degree.
Partha Bhattacharjee
Partha Bhattacharjee is a Senior Research Fellow (English) in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Patna. He has worked on American Autobiographical Comics and his thesis is titled as – BODY IN GRAPHIC ÉCRITURE FÉMININE: REVISITING THE REGISTRATION OF TRAUMA IN SELECT AMERICAN ILLUSTRATORS. His research interests include comics studies, trauma studies, memory studies. He has published with reputed journals like IUP Journal of English Studies, Language in India, Journal of English Language and Literature, World Journal of English Language etc. His papers have been accepted in International Conferences (ImageTech – The Graduate Comics Organization, 2018 at the University of Florida; South Central Modern Language Association 2018; Jadavpur University Comics Festival, 2017). He can be reached at: partha.19@outlook.com
Courtney Bliss
Courtney Bliss is a Ph.D. student in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. She holds a M.A. in Popular Culture also from BGSU. Her current research is focused on the cultural phenomenon Hamilton: An American Musical. Her master’s thesis, “Reframing Normal: The Inclusion of Deaf Culture in the X-Men Comic Books,” looks at how Deaf Culture is unintentionally included in the culture of the X-Men comics and the implications of that. Other research interests include disability in superhero comics, Deaf Culture in the media, and fandom.
Pritesh Chakraborty
My name is Pritesh Chakraborty. I am presently working as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant in New York University, New York. I am an Assistant Professor of English at Acharya Sukumar Sen Mahavidyala, West Bengal, India. I am also a research scholar at West Bengal State University, West Bengal, India. I have obtained my MPhil. Degree from Calcutta University. I am researching on superhero comic books of Batman and I am interested in creative writing.
Sourav Chatterjee
Sourav holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Calcutta (2013). He has a Master’s degree in English from Jadavpur University (2015). He wrote his M.Phil. dissertation in the Department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University (2017). Sourav is now a Ph.D. Research Scholar in the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department. His research interests lie in Bengali comic strips, comic books, cartoons and graphic narratives of twentieth century West Bengal. His dissertation entails the politics of representation of the Bengali male body (masculinity studies), textual criticism, and comics and literary theory.
Christine Cook
Christine Cook is a PhD candidate at Wayne State University. Formerly, she served for thirty years in the military, and retired as a colonel. The proposed subject of her dissertation is the Women’s Army Corps during the Cold War military, from 1948-1978. In addition to her PhD studies, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Princeton University, a Masters of Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College, and a Master of Arts in Women’s and Gender Studies from Eastern Michigan University.
Meredith Dabek
Meredith Dabek is a PhD candidate, Irish Research Council Scholar, and Hume Scholar in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University. Working under the supervision of Dr. Jeneen Naji, her research looks at reader experiences with digital narratives. Meredith holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Fordham University (New York), a Master of Science in Public Relations from Boston University’s College of Communication (Massachusetts), and a Master of Arts in Digital Humanities from Maynooth University.
Ena Dhankar
Ena Dhankar is currently a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at University of Texas at Austin. She is a Literature student who completed her Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in 2016 from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). She completed her Master of Philosophy degree from the same University with the dissertation titled “Printing Folk Art, Printing Marginality: A Study of Navayana’s Graphic Novels”. Her research interest lies in Subaltern Studies, Visual Arts, Popular Culture and Tribal Arts.
Rachel Dortin
Rachel Dortin is a third year Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. She earned her MA in Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Findlay in Findlay, OH in 2016. Her dissertation focuses on the ways in which communities are isolated–rather than united–by difference. She researches the nexus of embodiment, identity, and difference as they pertain to service-learning and community-engaged writing classes. She relies on an ecofeminist pedagogical and methodological approach to her teaching and research respectively.
Laura Felschow
Dr. Laura E. Felschow is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at SUNY Oneonta. She recently earned her doctorate in media studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include gender and media production, fan studies, and superhero media.
Kathryn Florence
Kathryn Florence is an immigrant qallunaat-settler currently residing in Montreal. She conducted her undergraduate work at Purdue University, Indiana, graduating with an Honors Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History, minoring in Classics. Her previous research, under Dr. Richard Blanton, was concerned with the creation of the Feathered Serpent at ancient Teotihuacan and its interaction with Mayan ruler iconography. Florence is currently pursuing a Masters of Arts in Art History at Concordia University, Montreal. Her present research explores the reclamation of the figure of The Sea Woman in Inuit art as a symbol of resistance and expression of indigenous identity in Canada. Her research process combines anthropological methodology, art historical analysis, and computational R statistics to interrogate the intersection between art, identity, polity, and belief systems. Florence is the current Executive Director of the Canadian Latin American Archaeology Society (CLAAS) and remains active in researching Mesoamerica alongside First Nations visual culture.
Quincy Flowers
Dr. Quincy Flowers is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College. He is a graduate of the University of Houston (Ph.D. American Literature and Creative Writing, 2012) and New York University (M.A. American Literature, 2007), where he received a New York Times Fellowship. Awards include a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts. His creative work has recently been published in Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic and Black Renaissance / Renaissance Noire. He is currently completing Canebrake, a novel that connects ancestral knowledge, black rural life, and the global, cosmopolitan present.
Cornelius Fortune
Cornelius Fortune is the senior editor of BLAC (Black Life, Arts and Culture) Detroit magazine and a former editor of the Michigan Chronicle. His work has appeared in Yahoo News, The Advocate, the Chicago Defender, In the Fray, and others. His race relations play, “Dislocations,” a DUFT finalist, was recently performed at Winthrop University. He is currently an English Literature graduate student at Mercy College.
Livingston Garland
Livingston Garland is a masters student at Wayne State University with five years of
experience in secondary education. He enjoys taking the knowledge gleaned from the collegiate classroom and incorporating the ideas into the high-school environment to enrich the learning and engagement of his students.
Jose Guzman
Jose Guzman, Jr has a B.A. in English and American Literature from Harvard University. He has been writing the “In Case You Missed It” blog for Kino Club 313 since May of 2018. He has been happily married to Wayne State University’s Professor Chera Kee since 2009 and is a former 1-day champion of Sports Jeopardy with Dan Patrick.
Leah Hamilton
Leah Hamilton is Visiting Faculty in the Department of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati. She is originally from New Hampshire, and received a B.A. in English Language in Literature from Smith College, her M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of New Hampshire, and has completed PhD coursework in Medieval Literature at The Catholic University of America.
Wally Hastings
A. Waller Hastings is professor of English at West Liberty (WV) University and a specialist in children’s and young adult literature, 19th century British fiction, and the history of comics. He has previously presented papers on Wonder Woman, one of which is currently in preparation for publication.
Namrata Jain
Dr. Namrata Jain, Asian Studies, Center for International Studies, Ohio University.
I am currently working on a research project at Asian Studies, Center for International Studies, Ohio University. I was a Fulbright FLTA at Ohio University, Ohio from 2017-18. I have taught English Literature in University of Delhi, India for more than ten years. I completed my PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Research Interests – Contemporary Indian Theater, Modernism, British Indian History, Popular Culture and Gender Studies.
Eric Jarrard
Eric Jarrard is a doctoral candidate in Hebrew Bible at Harvard where his research focuses on both memory studies and the Hebrew Bible as well as biblical themes in contemporary popular culture. His work on the former includes his dissertation, “’Remember This Day on Which You Came out of Egypt’: The Exodus Motif in Biblical Memory,” on the latter, his work includes forthcoming articles in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin and Biblical Reception.
Mary Karcher
Mary Karcher earned her doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition from Wayne State University and specializing in Computers and Composition. As an academic, her interests include new media, participatory culture, composition pedagogy, fan studies, game theory and digital archives. As a fan, she is obsessed with Supernatural, Firefly, Fringe, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Star Trek and generally all things geeky. As an acafan (borrowing the term from Henry Jenkins), Mary Karcher hopes to empower other scholars who also consider themselves as fans to stand up with her and proudly be counted!
Alina Klin
Alina Klin, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in Slavic Studies in the Department of CMLLC. Her professional interests include contemporary Polish literature, film and politics. Recently she has been exploring possibilities of using the video game “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” in an educational setting, as well as relationships between the literary texts by Andrzej Sapkowski that introduced the character of the Witcher Geralt of Rivia, and the game based on them.
Karolina Kusto
Karolina Kusto is a graduate student at the American Studies Center of the University of Warsaw. She is interested in the history of American Jews and the stereotypes surrounding this ethnic group. She wrote her BA thesis on the assimilation of Jews in 1960’s America, in which she analyzed how this process was presented in the TV show Mad Men. During her graduate studies she would like to further explore this area of research.
Nicholas Langenberg
Nicholas is currently pursuing his master’s degree in English literature at Grand Valley State University. He is the assistant editor for the journal Spring and a father of three. In his work, Nicholas explores the connection between cultural narratives and social values.
Haneul Lee
Haneul Lee is a doctoral student of Cinema Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Her current research interest is centered on a historiographical revision of state and/or military sanctioned violence within contemporary media culture based on utopian rhetoric to recuperate the voiceless subjects omitted from the grand narrative of history in global and digital era. As interested in the cultural reproduction of sociopolitical memories in response to such historical events in popular cinema, documentary and interactive game design, she is also pursuing how the media industry re-appropriates such a historiographic practice as a form of commodity. She has a MA in Film and Media Studies at Columbia University.
Trinidad Linares
Trinidad Linares (M.A., Popular Culture) is Assistant Coordinator of Special Programs in the Office of Multicultural Affairs at Bowling Green State University. She has contributed to Bitch, Meridians, P&T, and The Projector and was cited in The Journal of Popular Culture. Linares presented at the Pippi to Ripley Conference (Ithaca College), the Buffy to Batgirl Conference (Rutgers University-Camden), the Literature/Film Association Conference (Rowan University), Global Responses to 9/11 and the War on Terror: Literary, Media, and Film Perspectives (BGSU), and ACA/PCA Conference (Indianapolis). She has exhibited artwork at the Toledo Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Art.
Peter Marra
Peter Marra earned his Ph.D. in English with a concentration in Film & Media Studies from Wayne State University. His dissertation, Queer Slashers, argues the queer lineage and queer function of the U.S. slasher film. While at Wayne State University, Peter was the president of the Film Studies student group Kino Club 313 and the co-founder and social chair of the LGBTQ graduate student organization GQWSU. His work has appeared in Film Criticism and the edited collections Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington Books, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
Hannah Mueller
Dr. Hannah Mueller is an Instructor of Film Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University. Her work focuses on transnational popular cultures and audiences, including popular cinema, television, digital media, and participatory culture. She is interested in fan communities, transmedia storytelling, media representations of sex and nudity, media representations of incarcerated people and correctional facilities, and discourses of “high” and “low” culture. Her publications include work on Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes adaptations, Brazilian queer cinema, East-German fairy tale adaptations, the prison on US television, and sex and nudity in “Quality TV.”
Riley Nisbet
Riley Nisbet is a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. His research interests are in transnational literature and spatiality studies.
Isaac Pickell
Isaac Pickell is a graduate of Miami University’s MFA program and a PhD student of literary and cultural studies here at Wayne State University in Detroit, where his work critical and creative work circles around the poetics at the borderlands of blackness and his personal experience of racial passing. His poetry can be found in Fence, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Isaac has taken a seat in all fifty states, and has a lot to look forwards to.
Kelly Roy Polasek
Kelly Roy Polasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies in the English Department at Wayne State University. Her research focuses on 20th century American antiwar literature and aesthetic theory. She is the Managing Editor of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts and Co-President of the Visual Culture Student Group at Wayne State.
Blue Profitt
Blue Profitt is an MA candidate in English at Bowling Green State University. Her research interests include fantasy and horror literature and film, psychoanalysis, and popular culture. Previously, she has published on the meaning of blood and penetration in Stoker’s Dracula and Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her master’s thesis, an anti-Oedipal/narcissistic reading of the Star Wars films, will be published in May 2019.
Aaron Proudfoot
Aaron Proudfoot, a graduate of Wayne State, is currently an M.A./Ph.D. student in the English department at the University of Connecticut. His research and teaching interests include Renaissance drama, adaptation studies, and the rhetorics and literacies of Hip Hop. He is particularly interested in studying the textual adaptation and appropriation in modern films and television shows that take Shakespeare as their main character. This research is also raising questions about the role of Renaissance influence in shows like Game of Thrones and about the ways adaptation studies changes how we think about historical fiction, historical comedy, period drama and biopics of artists in any genre or time period.
Steven Proudfoot
Steven Proudfoot recently graduated from Wayne State University with a BA double major in Psychology and English. Steven takes an interdisciplinary lens to Game Studies and Fan Studies using the approaches of both of his majors, examples including game studies papers on ARG’s and negative emotion along with a social psychology survey on motivations for and attitudes about Fan Personality Quizzes. Other than exploring strange intersections of academia, Steven enjoys and likes to talk about games, anime, and anything else people are fans of.
Lindsay Ragle-Miller
Lindsay Ragle-Miller is currently a graduate student assistant at Wayne State University, pursuing a master’s degree in literature and cultural studies. After graduation, she plans on continuing on to a Ph.D. in literature, focusing on medieval literature. She is interested in medieval literature and culture from the High Middle Ages. For festive occasions, Lindsay likes to cook authentic medieval recipes for family and friends.
Laurel Rogers
Laurel Rogers is a second-year Master’s student in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include fan studies, transmedia storytelling, adaptation, science fiction, and superheroes.
Diana Rosenberger
Diana Rosenberger is a 5th year PhD Candidate at Wayne State University. Her dissertation explores what the novel, as a specific formal practice, can contribute to digital studies, as well as how ideas around twenty-first century media might change the way we theorize the novel. In addition to canonical texts like Pamela, Middlemarch, and Invisible Man, her work covers contemporary “novel-ish” projects that emerge from unexpected platforms, such as television, social media, and podcasts.
Sebastian Schuller
After graduating in Comparative Literature at LMU Munich, Sebastian Schuller who holds a PhD scholarship of Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes is currently working on a PhD thesis on materialist literary theory in the age of globalization. His fields of research include post-colonial studies, globalization theory, Hip-Hop studies, Bert Brecht and the aesthetics of Marxism. Schuller published papers on Brecht and Gisela Elsner (“The Acid of the Materialist Notion of History”, Brecht Yearbook 43/2018), the relationship of Marxism and literary theory, German Hip-Hop and is editor of an anthology on the rise of the Alt-Right in Germany (Die Zeit der Monster, Ochsenfurt: Kulturmaschinen, 2018).
Dolores Sisco
Dr. Sisco is currently an Assistant Professor in American Literature, women’s and gender studies, African American film, and literatures of the African Diaspora. As the Director of American Studies, Dr. Sisco teaches courses on Immigration history, American popular culture and working-class studies.
Molli Spalter
Molli Spalter is a PhD student at Wayne State University in Detroit where she studies contemporary American poetry, feminist theory, and visual culture. Molli’s chapter “Feminism and Social Movements” is forthcoming in the Wiley E. Blackwell Companion to Feminist Studies. Her poetry can be found in Rust + Moth and Rogue Agent Journal.
Priyanka Tripathi
Dr. Priyanka Tripathi is an Assistant Professor of English at IIT, Patna. Her PhD dissertation in 2011 from IIT Kharagpur was titled, “Sexual is Political: Gender, Body and Language: in Indian Women’s Short Fiction in English”. She has published with Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Literature & History (Sage), Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, IUP Journal of English Studies, Atlantic Literary Review, The Commonwealth Review etc. She works in the area of Indian Writing in English, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Literary Censorship.
ORCID – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9522-3391
ORCID – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9522-3391
Ella Tucan
Ella Tucan is a third year Ph.D. student in English at Wayne State University, with a concentration in Film and Media Studies. She earned her M.A. in Communication at Georgia State University, where she taught film history, aesthetics, and analysis, as well as courses in journalism and mass media. Her interests center on affect theory, sensation and embodiment, with an emphasis on gender, the female body and sexuality. Her work will be published in the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Feminist Studies and in an upcoming special issue of Modern Language Studies.
Nicole Varty
Nicole Guinot Varty is a senior lecturer in the English Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her PhD dissertation, “Ecological Awareness: Enacting an Ecological Composition Curriculum to Encourage Student Knowledge Transfer” focused on implications of an ecological model of writing in the FYC classroom. Her current scholarship builds on the ecological model of writing, focusing on studnet writing knowledge transfer across contexts, composition threshold concepts, literacy studies and rhetorics of religion. Some of her recent scholarship has been published in the Language Arts Journal of Michigan, presented at CCCC, NCTE, CWPA and has appeared on National Writing Project radio.
Maria Wendeln
Maria Spencer Wendeln holds a B.A. in Art History from the University of Louisville, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Wayne State University. Her main areas of interests are royal women, portraiture, and political culture during the era of the French Revolution.
Dr. Wendeln is a part-time faculty member in both WSU’s Department of History and Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies Program. Since 2014, she has regularly taught “History of Women, Gender & Sexuality in the Modern World;” and is currently working on developing a new course focusing on sex and sexuality in the Modern Era.
Caroline Winstel
2018 Honors Graduate of the Master of Arts Public History Program at Northern Kentucky University with College of Arts and Sciences funded grant for thesis/capstone: “Drawn From Memory: Comic Books and Graphic Novels as a Vehicle for Memory Studies in Oral Testimony.” Program utilized hands-on learning in collections, archives, oral history, and management and administration with an additional area of focus in Inclusive Educational Programming. Received Bachelor of Arts in History from Northern Kentucky University in 2017. Presidents and Deans List in Undergraduate with focused research in Sephardic and North American Jewry.
2018 Honors Graduate of the Master of Arts Public History Program at Northern Kentucky University with College of Arts and Sciences funded grant for thesis/capstone: “Drawn From Memory: Comic Books and Graphic Novels as a Vehicle for Memory Studies in Oral Testimony.” Program utilized hands-on learning in collections, archives, oral history, and management and administration with an additional area of focus in Inclusive Educational Programming. Received Bachelor of Arts in History from Northern Kentucky University in 2017. Presidents and Deans List in Undergraduate with focused research in Sephardic and North American Jewry.