The winners for the 2022 CSS election are noted below! These folks will join the current Executive Board members to do some amazing work for the society in the coming year!
CSS Second Vice President – Zack Kruse
Zack Kruse is the author of Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity (University of Mississippi Press, 2021). Currently Assistant Professor of English at Albany State University, he is a scholar of comics, film, and American literature. His scholarly work can also be found in publications such as INKS, Studies in Comics, Source: Notes on the History of Art, and in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, as well as multiple book chapters. As a comics creator, his strip, Mystery Solved!, appeared in Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, and he was the founder and sole-operator of the Appleseed Comics and Art Convention in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In service to the Comics Studies Society, he is currently a member-at-large, where he has chaired the Bylaws Revision Committee as well as contributing to the conference and future conferences committees. He has previously served as the panel coordinator for the Michigan State University Comics Forum and as the managing editor for The Journal of Popular Culture. He is also the former marketing director for the largest comics retailer in the U.S. His voice can be heard on numerous comics and academic podcasts. His current work is on kayfabe and how the language and tactics of the carnival and professional wrestling inform contemporary discourses about race and class U.S. politics.
CSS Members-at-Large – Anna Peppard & Julian Chambliss
Dr. Anna F. Peppard started her PhD at York University intending to write a dissertation about American Naturalism, but was quickly seduced by comics and never looked back. Anna’s research explores issues of representation in popular media with a focus on superheroes, gender, and sexuality. Her comics scholarship has been widely published in academic journals such as International Journal of Comic Art, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Journal of Fashion Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Studies in Comics as well as numerous edited collections. Her anthology Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero (University of Texas Press) won the 2021 prize for best edited collection from the Comics Studies Society. She also reviews comics studies books for the “This Year’s Work in English” bibliography from Oxford University Press and organizes the Toronto Comic Arts Festival’s academic symposium. She served on the board of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics (CSSC) as the VP Communications (English) from 2018-2020. She has maintained her involvement with the CSSC as a member of the advisory committee. She has also served on the awards committee for the Comics Studies Society (2021).
Anna is additionally proud of her public scholarship. She hosts a weekly comics podcast called The Oh Gosh, Oh Golly, Oh Wow! Podcast and contributes essays and reviews to websites such as The Walrus, The Vault of Culture, The Middle Spaces, Shelfdust, ComicsXF, Women Write About Comics, and Comic Book Herald. She is passionate about public outreach and using her knowledge to educate while being educated in turn through her interactions with diverse, passionate scholarly and fan communities.
Julian C. Chambliss is Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. His research interests focus on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. His writings on comics have appeared in More Critical Approaches to Comics (2019) and The Ages of Black Panther (2020). Beyond the Black Panther: Visions of Afrofuturism in American Comics, his exhibition is available as a physical and virtual experience at the MSU Museum. His books include 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 exploring comics and community. He serves as faculty lead for the Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop (GPRW) in the Department of English and Co-host of the Graphic Possibilities Podcast. He also serves as faculty lead for Comics as Data North America (CaDNA), an ongoing collaborative project at Michigan State University that uses library catalog metadata to explore North American comic culture.
CSS Social Strategist (Appointed Position) – Peter Cullen Bryan
Peter Cullen Bryan (he/him) is a lecturer of English at Clemson University, where he teaches a class on Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye run (and Freshman Composition, which is much less exciting). He has been attending Comics Studies Society since 2018 (when he learned that it existed), and would like the opportunity to help grow the organization beyond his general excitement. He brings experience operating and planning several academic conferences both virtual and in-person, including the International Communication Association and the Popular Culture Association – where he serves as the co-chair of the new Disney Studies Area – among many other hats. He brings specialized expertise to the Comics Studies Society from both a transcultural perspective (his work on the German Donald Duck fandom and contacts with several intuitions and archives as part of that effort) and as a precariously employed professor (and can speak to how comics made that less precarious). He would like to see the organization continue to grow the field of comics studies, and believe that there are growth areas in Europe and elsewhere that are well-suited to the shift toward online conferences that the CSS is well-positioned to seize upon.
GSC Vice President – Sydney Heifler
Sydney Heifler is a comic book historian who specializes in romance comics created during the immediate post-war era in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Sydney is a recent graduate of the MSt in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford. Sydney is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in history at the Ohio State University with a Distinguished University Fellowship. Sydney can be found on Twitter @romancecomicbks. Pronouns: she/they.
GSC Secretary-Treasurer – Maite Urcaregui
Maite Urcaregui (she/her/hers) is completing her PhD in English with doctoral emphases in Black Studies and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She will be joining the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University as an Assistant Professor in the fall. Her research investigates how multiethnic US authors employ visual poetics to navigate and critique the visual politics of race, particularly as they demarcate national belonging and who is seen as “citizen.” She frequently contributes reviews to the International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) and has published in Prose Studies as well as The Routledge Companion to Gender & Sexuality in Comic Book Studies and Gender and the Superhero Narrative. Her public scholarship has appeared in The Black Scholar, The Middle Spaces, and the Eisner Award-winning Women Write About Comics. Maite’s research was recognized with the Comics Studies Society’s 2020 Hillary Chute Award for best graduate student paper. Maite is currently serving as the Secretary-Treasurer for the GSC and is excited for another opportunity to use what she has learned in this role to support graduate students and early career scholars in comics studies. In her role as Secretary-Treasurer, Maite has worked to support her colleagues on the Executive Committee, showcase the scholarship and successes of graduate students, build mentorship and community virtually and otherwise, and get money into the hands of graduate students to support their research and conference travel. The GSC has been a space of intellectual support and community for Maite, and she is committed to ensuring that it is an inclusive space that listens and responds to the needs of graduate students in an evolving field and a changing market.
GSC Members-at-Large – Frida Heitland & Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero
Frida Heitland (she/her) completed her master’s degree at the University of Oxford in 2020, which means that – ironically – she spent that summer immersed in the theme of comics and subjective, potentially traumatic experience. Her interest in comics germinated quite innocently while reading Donald Duck and Asterix as a child. It took a more theoretical turn during her undergraduate work on David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp and questions of (the presentation of) multimodal narrative identity construction. The arising theme of memory lead her to autobiographical works in her graduate studies and down the (somewhat darker?) rabbit hole of human experience, trauma, and its expression in works by Alison Bechdel, David B., and Katie Green. She seeks to delve deeper into questions of how/if comics form can facilitate an expression of subjective experience, drawing on phenomenological concepts by philosophers like Merleau-Ponty.
Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at The Ohio State University who specializes in Latinx Studies and popular culture. She is at work on her dissertation, which explores how Latina content creators use social media profiles to produce self-images and an online self. She has published chapters in TikTok Cultures in the United States (Routledge, 2022), Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century (U of Arizona P, 2022), Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (SDSU Press, 2021), and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies (Routledge, 2020). In 2020, she also co-edited a special issue of Prose Studies (vol. 41, no. 2) on Latinx nonfiction with Frederick Luis Aldama.
In addition to her research, Katlin has been actively involved in programming focused on comics and popular culture, especially for BIPOC high school and college students. From 2019-2021, she served as both the Central Coordinator for SOL-CON: The Brown, Black, and Indigenous Comics Expo and as an Executive Team Leader with the Latinx Space for Enrichment and Research (LASER). She presently serves as the Co-Coordinator of Programming and Marketing Support for The Latinx Comic Arts Festival (LCAF) and is an Advisory Board member with LCAF at Modesto Junior College. She also serves as the Member-at-Large for the Graduate Student Caucus of the Comics Studies Society.
