Please join us in welcoming the newly elected members of the CSS Executive Board!
Second Vice President – Sam Langsdale
Sam Langsdale is an independent scholar, educator and media critic. Her work employs intersectional feminist philosophies to analyze the politics around representation of race, gender, and sexuality in various types of media. She is the author of the forthcoming book From the Margins into the Gutters: Searching for Feminist Superheroes (University of Texas Press), the co-editor of Monstrous Women in Comics (University Press of Mississippi), and the author of numerous book chapters in volumes such as The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies; Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero; Comics and Sacred Texts: Reimagining Religion and Graphic Narratives; and Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres. Her work has also been published in journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Animation Practice, Process and Production; MAI: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture, and Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship. Sam proudly served on the Executive Board of the Comics Studies Society from 2018 to 2021. While her primary duty was to serve as the Social Strategist (the person behind the Twitter curtain), she also served on several conference committees, and the code of conduct committee. She plays an active role in facilitating academic communal events in collaboration with The Digital Cultural Studies Co-Operative such as Realizing Resistance I, II & III and the Flyover Comics Symposium. You can read more about her work here https://www.samlangsdale.com/.
Secretary – Shawn Gilmore
Shawn Gilmore is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he teaches courses on comics, fiction, critical theory, and writing. He is the founder and editor of The Vault of Culture (https://www.vaultofculture.com/), a cultural criticism site devoted to public scholarship on a wide range of approaches to a variety of cultural objects. A founding member of the Comics Studies Society, he has written and presented on a bizarre array of comics and is co-editor of a forthcoming collection, The Comics of Karen Berger.
Member-at-Large – Adrienne Resha
Adrienne Resha is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies program at the College of William & Mary. She holds a B.A. in International Affairs and anthropology from Florida State University and an M.A. in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies from the University of Virginia. Her dissertation, “From Superman to Sana Amanat: Alienation, Assimilation, and American Superhero Comics, 1938 to Present,” is about post-9/11 and post-Arab Spring Arab and Muslim American superheroes. She won a Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award in support of this work. Her writing has appeared online at PanelxPanel, Popverse, Shelfdust, The Middle Spaces, and the Eisner Award-winning WWAC and in print in Mixed-Race Superheroes and Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. Adrienne currently serves as Assistant Editor for Book Reviews at Inks and previously served as the Secretary-Treasurer (18-19), Vice President (19-20), and President (20-21) of CSS’s Graduate Student Caucus. During her tenure as GSC President, she developed the mentorship program, served on the Awards Committee, and represented graduate students on the CSS Executive Board.
Member-at-Large – John Edward Martin
John Edward Martin is Director of Scholarly Communication at the University of North Texas Libraries and a member of the Research Librarian Cohort of the Comics Studies Society. He served as one of the local hosts, along with Dr. Jo Davis-McElligatt, of the 2023 Comics Studies Society Conference in Denton, TX and as a co-organizer of the Flyover Comics Symposium (2020) and three Realizing Resistance Star Wars conferences (2019, 2021, 2023), all hosted by the Digital Cultural Studies Cooperative (https://dcsco-op.org/). His work with comics includes developing the Comics Studies@UNT initiative, which supports comics studies across the university. His own research interests include horror & crime comics, literary adaptations, and comics librarianship. He recently published a chapter on “Poe, Women, and Comics” in Amy Branam Armiento and Travis Montgomery, ed. Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision (Lehigh UP, 2023) and has presented his work at the 2021 CSS Conference, the Fifth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference, the Flyover Comics Symposium, and others. He is developing an Open Access digital monograph on the history of Poe in comics for publication in 2024. He holds a PhD in American literature from Northwestern University and an MS in Library Science from the University of North Texas.
Many thanks to all of you who voted!
