David M. Ball is Assistant Professor of English at Dickinson College. His essays on American literature and culture have appeared in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Critical Matrix, and the forthcoming Contemporary American Comics: Creators and Their Contexts (University Press of Mississippi). He is currently completing a book titled “False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism, 1850–Present.”
Georgiana Banita is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the University of Constance, Germany. She writes on techniques of visual and intermedial representation in literature after 9/11, with special emphasis on their ethical implications. Her essays have appeared in Parallax, Peace Review, M/MLA and several book collections. She is also a contributor to the forthcoming anthologies History of the American Bestseller, edited by Sarah Churchwell and Thomay Ruys Smith (Palgrave), About Raymond Williams, edited by Lawrence Grossberg (Routledge), and Film and Genocide, edited by Kristi Wilson and Tomas Crowder (Wayne State University Press).
Margaret Fink Berman is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. She wrote the “comics” article for W.J.T. Mitchell’s online “Theories of Media Keywords Glossary” and has given conference presentations on Chris Ware’s representation of disability as well as on disability and trauma in Al Davison’s graphic novel The Spiral Cage.
Jacob Brogan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Cornell University. His research interests include fragmentation, temporality, and ethics.
Isaac Cates currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Vermont. He has published reviews of comics by Daniel Clowes, Jason, and Nick Bertozzi, and presented papers on comics artists as various as Rick Geary, Will Eisner, and Alan Moore. He also writes on twentieth-century poetry. With Mike Wenthe, he self-published a long-running series of minicomics. His book-length study of the graphic novel, The Graphic Novel: How Comics Grew Up, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Joanna Davis-McElligatt is currently writing a dissertation on racism, nativism, and immigration in twentieth-century American literature in the Department of English at the University of Iowa.
Shawn Gilmore is completing a dissertation on graphic narration, serial fiction, and the spatialization of twentieth-century American literature in the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Matt Godbey is a full-time instructor at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches courses on twentieth-century and postwar urban American literature. His essay on Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude recently appeared in Arizona Quarterly and he is working on a book project titled “The Fiction of Gentrification.”
Jeet Heer is finishing a doctorial thesis at York University in Toronto on the cultural politics of Little Orphan Annie. His essays have appeared in the National Post, Slate.com, the Boston Globe, the Literary Review of Canada, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Guardian of London. With Kent Worcester, he is co-editor of Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (University Press of Mississippi) and A Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi). With Chris Ware and Chris Oliveros, he is editing Walt and Skeezix, a series of volumes reprinting Frank King’s Gasoline Alley (Drawn & Quarterly, 3 vols. to date). He has written introductory essays to many books, including George Herriman’s Krazy and Ignatz, 1935–1936 and Krazy and Ignatz, 1939–1940 (Fantagraphics), Clare Briggs’s Oh Skin-nay (Drawn & Quarterly), and Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie: Volume One (IDW).
Martha B. Kuhlman is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University, where she teaches courses on the graphic novel, Central European literature, and critical theory. In the field of comics, she has published articles in the Journal of Popular Culture and European Journal of Comic Art and contributed to the forthcoming MLA volume Teaching the Graphic Novel. In addition, she has published articles about Central European literature and culture in journals such as Modernism/Modernity, the Comparatist, and Studies in 20th Century Literature.
Katherine Roeder is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Delaware, where she is preparing a dissertation on the intersection of fantasy, art, and mass culture in the work of Winsor McCay. She recently published an essay titled “Looking High and Low at Comic Art” in the spring 2008 issue of American Art.
Peter R. Sattler is Associate Professor of American Literature at Lakeland College, where he created the first courses dedicated to the study of comic art. He has published and presented on a variety of topics within the field of comics scholarship, including the art of George Herriman (for Word & Image), comics and classroom practice (for the Milwaukee Art Museum), and, most recently, the intersection of American cartoonists and the avant-garde during the 1910s (for the Modernist Studies Association). He is currently working on a critical edition of the World War I comics of Bud Fisher.
Marc Singer is Assistant Professor of English at Howard University. His articles on contemporary literature, film, comics, and popular culture have appeared in Post Script, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, Twentieth-Century Literature, African American Review, and the International Journal of Comic Art.
Benjamin Widiss is Assistant Professor of English at Princeton University. He is currently completing a book entitled “Obscure Invitations: Engaging the Reader of Twentieth-Century American Literature” and is beginning one on notions of presence animating late-postmodern culture.
Daniel Worden is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. His previous work on the comics issue of McSweney’s Quarterly Concern, edited by Chris Ware, appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, and he is currently completing a book manuscript on masculinity in modernist American fiction.