I am a faculty member at Georgia Institute of Technology where I serve as Assistant Director of the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) undergraduate research program and lead the Graphic Medicine VIP team. Before joining VIP, I was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech where I taught first year writing. You can read short descriptions of my research, teaching, and interdisciplinary community building on this page, but be sure to check out the additional pages for more information.
Research
I am at work on two book projects: an edited collection of essays, comics and course designs for the Graphic Medicine series at Penn State University Press called Invisible Made Visible: Comics and Mental Illness (with Jessica Gross) and a monograph that explores how marginalized audiences use serial comics to form communities, tentatively titled Comics Correspondents: The Counterpublics of Seriality, under contract with the Ohio State University Press. In Comics Correspondents, which builds on the dissertation I wrote while a graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Madison, I link webcomics to print comics through the lens of what I call the “correspondence zone,” which refers to public dialogic spaces enabled by serial publication that serve as sites of resistance, solidarity, and world-making. From comment sections in webcomics to letter columns in commercial comics, I place genres that are seldom discussed together in dialogue with one another. Much of my published work, as well as my teaching and transdisciplinary community building, analyzes and deploys comics’ ability to form communities both across university departments and beyond university walls.
Teaching
As a teacher, I believe courses and assignments with practical applications help students develop the analytical tools and empathy necessary for responsible citizenship, and I have used both comics and digital media as tools for civic engagement on multiple occasions. In my Comics and Civic Engagement course, students analyzed comics about the city as models and collaborated with community partners such as the Center for Sustainable Communities and the Grove Park Foundation to help them create their own research-based comics about urban development issues in Atlanta, GA. You can view samples of student work from the public exhibition designed to raise awareness about issues such as gentrification and housing insecurity on my Facebook page, and you can read about the exhibition in the Georgia Tech Daily Digest. My focus on the multimodal nature of writing meshes with the social justice mission of my teaching, where I want all learners to be able to use their strengths to build the confidence that encourages them to tackle areas of academic work where they struggle. I have designed and taught a number of composition courses on such topics as writing in the disciplines, public memorial, and digital authorship, as well as been a T.A. for survey courses in American literature, world literature, and linguistics.
Interdisciplinary Community Building
I have been a leader in building spaces for comics studies both on a local and national level. At UW-Madison, I co-founded the Comics Workshop by securing a two-year grant from the A.W. Mellon Foundation. As social media coordinator, I drew in both university and community audiences. Our discussions included such topics as the representation of mental health issues in comics, the relationship between comics and games, and a talk recovering the experimental energy of comics in the 40s. Building on comics’ interdisciplinary appeal, I collaborated with professors from East Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, Journalism, the School of Medicine, the School of Library Sciences and other departments. In our second year, I proposed an undergraduate minor in Comics Studies to administrators.
At Georgia Tech, I have continued to take advantage of the interdisciplinary energy of comics to make connections, as in my position as liaison for the VIP program. As an advisor for VIP Humanitech, I served as a communication consultant for students working on long term STEM oriented projects such as technology reviews for the Sanivation waste to fuel program in Kenya or software development for drones used during disaster relief efforts. I worked most closely with a group of undergraduate researchers collaborating with the Clarkston Community Health Center in Clarkston, GA to create language independent materials (those in the camps speak at least 60 different languages) on such topics as mental health awareness or strategies for managing back pain. My interest in comics as a multimodal form of communication has also led to the development of the Research Drawing Jam workshop I teach in the Communication Center at GT, where I guide STEM students through visualization techniques I learned as a student of Lynda Barry that help them communicate about their research in a clear and engaging way. As a former Member at Large for the Comics Studies Society and a member of the Executive Board for the MLA Forum on Comics and Graphic Narratives, I am committed to continuing these organizational efforts on a national level with a particular focus on inclusiveness within the developing field.