Invited Speakers
Astrid Böger is professor of American Studies and director of the Arbeitsstelle für Graphische Literatur at Hamburg University. Her research focuses on visual cultural studies (co-editor of Transatlantic Perspectives on American Visual Culture, Special Issue of Amerikastudien, 2007), which is also where she situates her work on graphic narrative. Other research interests include the transnational study of popular culture (co-editor of Transnational Mediations: Negotiating Popular Culture between Europe and the United States, 2015) and gender studies (co-editor of FrauenKulturStudien: Weiblichkeitsdiskurse in Literatur, Philosophie und Sprache, 2000).
Casey Brienza is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and the Centre for Culture and the Creative Industries at City University London. Specializing in manga publishing in the United States, she has published numerous books and articles in which she analyses the social structure and transnational impact of the culture industries (e.g. Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics, 2016). In addition to the active collaboration in comic studies (co-editor of Cultures of Comics Work, 2016), Brienza’s other main research interest centers around the recent developments of digital technologies in connection with reading and publishing.
Michael A. Chaney is associate professor in English at Dartmouth College and has published a plethora of texts that focus on nineteenth-century American and African American literature (e.g. Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative, 2008) as well as visual culture studies. In his most recent monograph Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel (2017) he combines some of his major research interests in comics and autobiography. In addition, Chaney distinguishes himself as a creative writer which have appeared in such titles as The Minnesota Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Los Angeles Review.
Christina Meyer holds a PhD and a post-doctoral degree in American Studies. She is co-editor of New Perspectives on American Comic Books and Graphic Novels (a special essay of the journal Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2011) and Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (2013). Recently, she completed a book manuscript on The Serial Unfolding of the Yellow Kid (forthcoming 2018).
Fifi Mukuna is a cartoonist, graphic artist and illustrator from Kinshasa, Congo. She moved to Belgium with her family and received her primary education there until she enrolled for Fine Arts at the Art Academy in Kinshasa. From 1989, Fifi Mukuna has published caricatures and comics in a wide range of magazines and newspapers such as the weekly satirical Le Grognon, in which she focuses on topics related to her African origins. Finding herself in difficulties because of some of her caricatures, she left for France in 2002. Apart from publishing and collaborating in comics like Si tu me suis autour du monde (2005), she became a teacher at l'École régionale supérieure d'expression plastique de Tourcoing.
Stephan Packard is professor of Media Cultural Studies at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg and author of seminal publications on graphic narrative, including the monograph Anatomie des Comics: Psychosemiotische Medienanalyse (2006). As president of the Gesellschaft für Comicforschung (Society for Comics Studies, ComFor), he has been prominently involved in the institutionalization of comics studies in Germany. As the recipient of the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize for outstanding scholarly achievements (German Research Foundation and German Ministry of Education and Research, 2015), he ranks among the most renowned German media and comics scholars.
Joachim Trinkwitz is assistant professor in the department of German, Cultural, and Comparative Literature Studies at the University of Bonn. He is co-editor of Prinzip Synthese: Der Comic and founder and manager of the Bonn Online Bibliography of Comics Research. He has been teaching university classes on comics on a regular basis for more than eight years. His research interests include alternative comics, seriality, and crime comics.