Dr. Julian Chambliss (Michigan State University)
Julian C. Chambliss is Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. He is a core participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR) and co-director for the Department of English Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (DHLC). His research interests focus on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. His recent writings on comics have appeared in More Critical Approaches to Comics (2019) and The Ages of Black Panther (2020). His MSU Museum exhibition, Beyond the Black Panther: Visions of Afrofuturism in American Comics, is currently available as a physical and virtual experience. He is co-editor of Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience (2013), Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domain (2018), and Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (2018). His comics and digital humanities projects include The Graphic Possibilities OER, an open educational resource focused on comics, and Critical Fanscape, a student-centered critical making project focus on communities connected to comics in the United States. He serves as faculty lead for the Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop (GPRW) in the Department of English and Comics as Data North America (CaDNA) an ongoing collaborative project at Michigan State University that uses library catalog data to explore North American comic culture.
Dr. Benjamin Han (Tulane University)
Benjamin M. Han is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. He is the author of Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America (Rutgers University Press, 2020). He is currently completing his second book titled Reckoning with the World: South Korean Television and Latin America. His research focuses on television history, global media, and the cultural intersections between East Asia and Latin America.
Dr. Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University)
Dan Hassler-Forest works as an Assistant Professor in the department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, where he has taught courses on media industries, transmedia storytelling, critical theory, cultural analysis, and critical race theory. Dan has been a member of the Utrecht Young Academy, a bridge between young researchers from all Utrecht University faculties, since 2019.
He has published scholarly books and articles on science fiction, cultural studies, media theory, anti-capitalism and popular culture, and zombies, and also writes frequently for more popular platforms like The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is currently writing two separate books on the work of Janelle Monáe and the intersections between race, gender, and sexual identity in capitalist media industries.
Dr. Marita Sturken (NYU Steinhardt)
Marita Sturken is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (with Lisa Cartwright, third edition 2018), and Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism From Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (2007). Her book Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era will be published by New York University Press in January 2022.