Faculty Coordinator

Julian Chambliss

Julian C. Chambliss is a Professor of English with an appointment in History and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. In addition, he is a core participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR). His research interests focus on race, culture, and power in real and imagined urban spaces. His recent writing has appeared in American Historical Review, Phylon, Frieze Magazine, Rhetoric Review, and Boston Review. An interdisciplinary scholar he has designed museum exhibitions, curated art shows, and created public history projects that trace community, ideology, and power in the United States.

Graduate Student Coordinators

Justin Wigard

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.

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.

 

Past Graduate Coordinators

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.