Comprehending Comics: Exploring Methodologies and Approaches to Comic Studies in History and the Social Sciences Conference (2024)

Meet the organizers

Amy Matthewson

Amy Matthewson is a historian interested in race relations, identity, epistemologies, and visual and material cultures with particular focus on China in the British imagination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She holds a PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London and is a founding member of Asia Collections Network (ACN), a global platform for those with specialist knowledge of and involvement in collections of the arts and artefacts of Asia. Her book Cartooning China: ‘Punch,’ Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era (2022) explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese in the popular British satirical magazine Punch that were created over a sixty-year period from 1841-1901. You can see more on her website here.

Elizabeth Allyn Woock

Elizabeth Allyn Woock is an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. Her work focuses on medieval history and medievalisms, as well as comics studies and comics-based research. She is interested in exploring how the comics format can be harnessed for academic writing and takes every opportunity to explore this methodology. Her upcoming book Medieval Spaces in Comics
Affect and Ideology (2024) proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing and discussing narrative space in comics, and explores the communicative possibilities of the comics format, seeking to show rather than just tell the methodologies of space in comics-based research through illustrating key sections of the text. You can see more on her website here.

Johannes C. P. Schmid is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and American Studies at Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany, and associate editor at Amerikastudien/American Studies: A Quarterly, the official journal of the German Society for American Studies (GAAS). Johannes is author of Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics (2021) and Shooting Pictures, Drawing Blood: The Photographic Image in the Graphic War Memoir (2016), and he also co-edited the 2019 special issue “Graphic Realities: Comics as Documentary, History, and Journalism” (ImageTexT 11.1) and Framing [in] Comics and Cartoons: Essays on Aesthetics, History, and Mediality (2021).

And Elizabeth Woock. Details about contributing authors will be confirmed as soon as possible! Watch for updates here.

Fall Writing Workshop (2023)

Prof. Roberta Maierhofer, Head of the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz. Contact Prof. Maierhofer at roberta.maierhofer (at) uni-graz.at

Dr. Ivan Lacko, Head of the Department of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University. Contact Dr. Lacko at ivan.lacko (at) uniba.sk

Dr. Elizabeth Woock, workshop project coordinator from the Department of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts at Palacky University, contact Dr. Woock at elizabethallyn.woock (at) upol.cz

Supporting collaborators will be added here. 

Elizabeth Allyn Woock

Olomouc, Czech Republic

About me: I’m an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the beautiful city of Olomouc, in the Czech Republic. I’m happily occupying a little corner of the American Literature section of our department, where I teach courses on American and British history, comic book studies, and late 19th or early 20th century American literature. I’m a sneaky medievalist who gave up studying 13th century religious disputes to research medievalism (and the spooky or fantastic versions of it) in comic books, graphic novels and memes.

For the theme of this year’s project, ethics and choices, I will be focusing on the uses and abuses of Ancient and Medieval histories in memes and comics (though in practice the Early-Modern period gets blended in there too) drawing from an ideologies and fan studies perspective. 

I’m the project organizer, so if the muffins at the conference are stale, you know whose fault it is. 

Barbara Postema

Groningen, Netherlands

About me: I am a Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes at the University of Groningen, after having spent time teaching at universities in New Zealand, Canada, and the US. In my comics scholarship I focus on issues of form and narration, and I have written research contributions on comics theory, on Canadian comics, and on wordless comics. My monograph Narrative Structure in Comics was published in a Brazilian translation in 2018, and I have published work on comics in Image and Narrative, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 9^a Arte, and the International Journal of Comic Art, as well as collections such as The Routledge Companion to Comics and Graphic Novels, The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel, and Abstraction and Comics. From 2013-2015 I held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at Ryerson University, during which time I began work on my study of silent comics. I am a former president of the Canadian Society of the Study of Comics and a founding member of the Comics Studies Society, where I currently serve as a Member at Large. With Candida Rifkind and Nhora Lucía Serrano, I am a co-editor of the Wilfrid Laurier UP book series Crossing Lines: Transcultural/ Transnational Comics Studies.

For this project I am continuing to focus on silent comics, and since images do not contain tenses, I am thinking about what particular visual techniques are used to show historical narrative in silent comics and how images represent historicity or pastness.

Dragoş Manea

Bucharest, Romania

About me: I’m a lecturer at the University of Bucharest, where I teach courses in contemporary American literature, cultural memory studies, and media studies. My current research deals primarily with the figure of the perpetrator in British and American historical comics and focuses on the following questions: how can narratives about the past contribute to a more nuanced understanding of perpetration? How do they contribute to the cultural memory of perpetration, particularly when the depiction of well-known historical figures is mixed with elements of fantasy? What is the benefit of producing an ethics of empathy, wherein the perpetrator is both humanized and even made to appear endearing or comical? How can stories that offer perpetrators a platform, thus positioning their audience in intimate proximity to the (largely imagined) workings of their psyche, negotiate the risk of being co-opted by extremist ideologies and their proponents?

Mihaela Precup

Bucharest, Romania

About me: I’m an associate professor at the American Studies program in the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at University of Bucharest. My work explores the graphic representation of violence (particularly in the context of war and conflict), post-traumatic memory, autobiography, and subversive femininity. I have also co-edited three special issues of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (on War and Conflict and Sexual Violence; with Rebecca Scherr). 

I’m interested in what happens when perpetrators become familiar figures, either because their representation is well-circulated in literature and popular culture (more specifically, comics), in ways that make the audience feel intimately connected to them, or simply because they are represented by their own family members and friends. I’m also interested in how the figure of the monster is appropriated by victims/survivors of violence during historical events or processes that position them in vulnerable situations. Some of the questions I’m pondering at this time are: What are the implications of a perpetrator becoming familiar, intimately close to the public, either because they are portrayed by a family member, or because they are the subject of a work that presents them in such a light that inevitably draws the audience into their intimate space? What happens when acts of perpetration become so familiar that we no longer identify/read them as such because they have already moved into a realm of inevitability and everydayness? How can we employ heavily theorized and emotionally laden terms such as “trauma” and “postmemory”—terms that originate in the study of the experience of Holocaust survivors and have generally been applied to victims of violence—in order to better comprehend the aftermath of perpetration and the effects of perpetration upon the families of the perpetrators? What can comics contribute to the current conversation about the proper representation of perpetrators? How does the examination of the perpetrator shade new light on what it means to be human/monstrous, as the quality (being human/monstrous) is usually mobilized either as a descriptive for the victim or the perpetrator?

Eszter Szép

Budapest, Hungary

Johannes Schmid

Flensburg, Germany

About me: I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Flensburg and associate editor of Amerikastudien / American Studies: A Quarterly, the official journal of the German Society for American Studies. I am also co-organizier of an editorial board member for [Inter]sections – The American Studies Journal at the University of Bucharest.

Previously, I worked as a research assistant in the research project Media-Aesthetic Strategies of Framing and Translation in Graphic Novels as part of the Forschungsverbund Übersetzen und Rahmen. Praktiken medialer Transformation (FÜR) at the University of Hamburg. My research interests include (nonfiction) comics, photography, (digital) visual culture, and video games.