Faculty Coordinator

Julian Chambliss

Julian C. Chambliss is a Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. In addition, he is a co-director for the Department of English Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (DHLC), faculty lead for the Department of English Graphic Possibilities Comic Research Workshop, and a core participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR). His research focuses on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. He is co-editor and contributor for Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience, a book examining the relationship between superheroes and the American Experience (2013). His book on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural, and Geopolitical Domain, was published in 2018. His recent essays on comics have appeared in More Critical Approaches to Comics (2019) and The Ages of Black Panther (2020). His exhibition for the MSU Museum, Beyond the Black Panther: Vision of Afrofuturism in American Comics, explores Afrofuturist theme comics produced in the United States. 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 focused on communities connected to comics in the United States. 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 data to explore North American comic culture. His comic history exhibitions include Take Off! Comic Artists from the Great White North (2019), Comics and the City (2020), and Justice for All: Social Justice in Comics (2022) at the MSU Library.

Graduate Student Coordinators

Nicole Huff

Nicole Huff is a first-year PhD student in the English department. She received her bachelor’s from Kalamazoo College where she majored in English and minored in Psychology and received her master’s from DePaul University in English. Her research interests focus on black feminist studies and how literary representations influence visual representations of black women in pop culture, with a particular interest in black women in the Whedonverse. Previously, she wrote her undergraduate thesis on Beyonce’s Lemonade album and her master’s thesis on Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and Kara Walker’s sculpture A Subtlety.

Brittany Atkins

Brittany Atkins (She/Her) is a PHD student in the Department of English at Michigan State University. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of the West Indies where she pursued a Literatures in English major and a Film Studies minor. Her research is interested in an exploration of Black Horror work across film, comics, and literature and how the speculative fiction genre serves as site for decolonization, trauma work and resilience. Tied to this, she is also interested in the visual and literary constructions of monstrosity and how these formations aid in discourse about race, identity and belonging.

Past Graduate Coordinators

Justin Wigard (2020-2022)

Justin Wigard is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, where he works with and teaches popular culture, game studies, comic studies, children’s literature, and digital humanities in the literature classroom. His work covers a wide range of subjects, including the Hallmark Channel’s Garage Sale Mystery film series (co-written with fellow grad student Mitch Ploskonka); professional wrestling and Street Fighter; chronotopal representations of feminism in Marvel’s Jessica Jones; the visual rhetoric of dinosaurs in Calvin and Hobbes; monstrous motherhood in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline; and digital visualizations of early-Modern Mughal biographies. Justin’s dissertation, Level 101, is a video game that he has developed which explores, explains, and interrogates the video game medium through worlds on history, design, and theory.

Ronny Ford (Fall 2020)

Ronny Ford is a PhD student in the English Department at Michigan State University. He also completed his English masters at MSU. His research area includes Medieval Literature, specifically gender and sexuality in a time before there was a concept of sexuality, and how readings of these concepts have changed over time. His languages of focus are Old and Middle English, as well as Latin and Old French.

Zack Kruse (2019-2020)

Zack Kruse‘s research areas include 20th-21st Century American literature, comics, and film. Zack is the panel coordinator for the Michigan State University Comics Forum and previously served as the managing editor for The Journal of Popular Culture. His first monograph, Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity is forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi.