Comic Studies Symposium: Race, Sex, Empire and American Comics

Featuring: Graduate Student Panel, Guest speaker talks, and a keynote panel moderated by Dr. Biko Caruthers.

Co-sponsored by:

Center for the Study of African and the African Diaspora (CSAAD)
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis:
NYU Center for the Humanities:
Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS)
Department of Comparative Literature
NYU Department of English

Ramzi Fawaz

Ramzi Fawaz is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of two books, including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016) and Queer Forms (2022), both published by NYU Press. Since Fall 2024, Fawaz has been a contributing editor to the journal Film Quarterly, where we authors "Imagination Unbound," a column about the radical democratic spirit of contemporary popular culture. He is currently writing a book titled How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World. In it, he argues for an understanding of humanities education as a form of psychedelic therapy, which uses art, literature, and media, instead of psychoactive drugs, to induce positive transformational   effects on the wellbeing of multiple generations of students. This Fall he will be launching his podcast, Nerd from the Future, which features dynamic conversations with the nation's leading humanities professors about the state of higher education today. 

Rebecca Wanzo

Rebecca Wanzo is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Storytelling (SUNY, 2009) and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (NYU, 2020). The Content of Our Caricature won the Katherine Singer Kovac Book Prize from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society, and the Best Scholarly/Academic Work from the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. Her research interests include African American literature and culture, feminist theory, cultural studies, media studies, and cartoon and comic studies. She has published essays in venues such as American Literature, Camera Obscura, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Film Quarterly, as well as numerous other academic journals, edited collections, and popular media outlets.

Qiana Whitted

Qiana Whitted is Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of the Eisner Award-winning book, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest and editor of the book, Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, which received the Edited Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society. Her research and teaching focus on Black literary and cultural studies, and American comics and graphic novels. Along with published articles, book chapters, and online writings that explore race, genre, and history in comics, she has written the introductory essay for Marvel’s new Penguin Classics collection of Black Panther comics. She has also served as editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society and chair of the International Comic Arts Forum.

Biko Caruthers

Biko Caruthers is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor in the English Department at NYU. He received his PhD in Afro-American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He specializes in 19th and 20th African American Literature, American comics and Black Critical Theory. His current book project considers how the nineteenth century makes possible the figure of the superhero and the villain as it emerges in its post-1945 context by way of Marvel and DC Comics. He is also an editorial assistant for INKS: The Journal of the Comic Studies Society.