People

Michelle Ann Abate is Associate Professor of Literature for Children and Young Adults at The Ohio State University.  Michelle has published articles on comics and graphic novels in Jeunesse and The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.   With Karly Marie Grice, Michelle co-curated the exhibit “ ‘Good Grief!’: Children and Comics,” which was on display at The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Summer 2016.  The exhibit was accompanied by a collection of catalogue essays, titled “Children’s Comics, Past and Present,” which Michelle co-edited with Joe Sutliff Sanders.  Finally, with Gwen Athene Tarbox, Michelle co-edited Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays.  The book will be released from the University of Mississippi Press in Spring 2017.

 

Margaret C. Flinn is an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian and Director of Graduate Studies of the Film Studies Program. She regularly teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on French-language animation and bande dessinée, and a freshman seminar on “High and Low? Art and Popular Culture,” which focuses on film and comics. Her publications in comics studies include articles on a bande dessinée series commissioned by the Louvre museum and on the French artist Farid Boudjellal. Upcoming work and classes will focus on documentary comics.

 

Jared Gardner is a Professor in the English Department and director of the Popular Culture Studies program. His past work in Comics Studies includes Projections: The History of 21st-Century Storytelling (Stanford UP, 2012) and editorial work with the Library of American Comics (IDW). He is currently editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society and is working on a monograph on comics, time and medicine, tentatively titled “Patient Time.” He regularly teaches classes on newspaper and comic book history and on the contemporary graphic novel.

 

Caitlin McGurk is the Associate Curator for Outreach & Engagement as well as an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, the largest collection of comics and cartoon art in the world. She leads the comics history and education efforts at the library, as well as all publicity, community outreach, and exhibit curation. Caitlin has also worked for The Center for Cartoon Studies’ Schulz Library, the Bulliet Comics Collection of Columbia University, and Marvel Comics. She has written for Diamond Comics Bookshelf magazine for educators and librarians, published her own comics, serves on the council for Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC) and as a juror for the Thurber House Graphic Novelist Residency Program. Her primary research interests include early women cartoonists, underground comix, alternative comics, and comics as educational tools. She currently serves as Associate Editor for the “From The Field” section of Inks.
 

Joseph Parrott is an historian of international, transnational, and American diplomatic history, with an emphasis on the intersection of foreign policy, race, and domestic politics. He is currently revising a manuscript that considers Portuguese decolonization in Africa as a noteworthy component in transforming western engagement with the global south. It cuts across diplomatic, activist, and socio-political history to illuminate how questions of race and empire drove the policy choices of U.S. leaders, African nationalists, and Portuguese officials, as well as the agenda of a wider western Left. Parrott is also working on an edited volume that examines the radical Third World ideology of Tricontinentalism and a second book-length project on transnational solidarity with the minority governments of southern Africa.

 

Jenny Robb is Curator and Associate Professor of The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, the largest academic research institution dedicated to cartoons and comics.  Before coming to Ohio State in 2005, she served as Curator of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco for 5 years.   She holds masters degrees in History and Museum Studies from Syracuse University.  Robb has curated numerous cartoon and comics exhibitions, including, most recently, Exploring Calvin and Hobbes and Dedini: The Art of Humor.  She is the author of several comics-related articles including “Bill Blackbeard: the Collector Who Rescued the Comics” in the Journal of American Culture and “From the Periodical Archives: Winsor McCay, George Randolph Chester and the Tale of the Jungle Imps” published in American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, & Bibliography.  

 

Cathy Ryan is a faculty member in the English Department whose research interests include teaching a new course on visual narrative and precursors to the graphic novel. She and co-author Christiane Buuck's chapter, “Looking Beyond the Scenes: Spatial Storytelling and Masking in Shaun Tan's ‘The Arrival’,” will soon be published in Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults, Eds. Michelle Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox (University of Mississippi Press, Spring 2017). She was founder and Director, Media Lab (Fisher College of Business; 1998 – 2000) and a founding member of the Digital Arts and Humanities Working Group, The Ohio State University < https://huminst.osu.edu/digital-arts-and-humanities >. She dreams about hosting a talk (and curated exhibit) with both the film producer and composer of the 50th Anniversary commemorative short film of Si Lewen's "The Parade" and to curate an exhibition displaying the ways students interact in words with images from Giacomo Patri's novel in linocuts, "White Collar." She is a member of The Comics Studies Society. Current interests include sound mapping, teaching wordless graphic novels, and mucking about in the creative worlds of Shaun Tan.

 

Robyn Warhol is Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor and Interim Chair of English at OSU.  Among other specialties (narrative theory, feminist theory, women writers, Victorian novel), she teaches Graphic Memoir and has published on Bechdel’s Fun Home.  Her books include Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feeling and Popular Forms  (OSUP, 2003) and Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Rutgers UP, 1989), an early work of feminist narratology which explicates her model of the “engaging narrator.”  As a feminist narratologist, Warhol studies the interrelations between gender and narrative forms.  She is known among feminist scholars as the co-editor (with Diane Price Herndl) of Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (1991, 1997) and its successor, Feminisms Redux (2009).  Her two most recent books won international awards: Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor, co-authored by Helena Michie  (Edinburgh UP, 2015) won the NAVSA prize for Best Book of the Year and Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, co-edited by Susan S. Lanser (OSUP, 2015) won honorable mention (2nd prize) for the Perkins Prize for best book in narrative.