Frank Bramlett is a linguist in the English department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His teaching and research interests are varied, and stretch from L2 composition pedagogy to language & identity to discourse and conversation analysis, and now include a cross-disciplinary blend of linguistics and comics. Previously, he has published research on the discourse elements of social service interviews; conversation analysis and the short fiction of Raymond Carver; and the interaction of gender and anti-gay prejudice and their effects on stigma by association. His first comics-related publication explored the intersection of hero and sissy identities in The Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather, focusing primarily on the main character’s use of verbal camp. Frank’s next publication is Linguistics and the Study of Comics (Palgrave 2012), which is an edited collection of chapters with an international scope exploring various interstices of linguistics and comics scholarship. When not swimming or doing yoga or diagramming sentences, Frank can be found at Legend Comics in Omaha, Nebraska, eyeing back issues of Green Lantern comics.
Roy T. Cook is an Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities and an Associate Fellow of the Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen – Scotland. He works in the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of logic, and the aesthetics of popular art (especially comics!) He co-edited The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (2012, Wiley-Blackwell) with Aaron Meskin (University of Leeds) and has published articles on comics in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and in various anthologies including Essays on Graphic Novels, Comics, and Education (R. Weiner & C. Syma eds., MacFarland) and The Avengers and Philosophy: Earth’s Mightiest Thinkers (M. White ed., Wiley-Blackwell). Professor Cook’s favorite comic character is the Sensational She-Hulk.
Qiana Whitted is an Associate Professor of English and African-American Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her research and teaching interests currently focus on African-American literary and comics studies. She is co-editor of Comics and the U.S. South, a collection forthcoming in January 2012 from University Press of Mississippi that includes her own essay on the intersection between postmodern slave narrative conventions and horror comics in Swamp Thing and Bayou. Other academic publications include the book, “A God of Justice?”: The Problem of Evil in Twentieth-Century Black Literature, as well as articles in African American Review, Southern Literary Journal, and the Encyclopedia of Comics and Graphic Novels. She is also the promotion and communications coordinator for the International Comic Arts Forum. Her current project explores critical representations of race in 1950s comics.
Michael A. Johnson is an Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches courses on medieval literature, critical theory, and Franco-Belgian comics. His research centers largely on questions of gender and sexuality, rhetoric, pedagogy, and psychoanalysis. With one published article on Fabrice Neaud’s Journal (“Placing/Facing Fabrice Neaud”) and another essay in the works on Lefèvre’s and Guibert’s The Photographer (“How Not to Orientalize the Afghan”) his work in comics has been thus far focused on questions of autobiography, the ethics of alterity, and the face. He also keeps a food blog (http://letthespiceflow.blogspot.com) and is interested in the growing phenomenon of comics cook books and comics food blogs in the francophone world. His recently finished manuscript, The Medieval Erotics of Grammar, is currently under review.
