Meet the Grant Team
The SDSU Project Team, Pamela Jackson and Elizabeth Pollard, will collaborate with
two grant advisors, Jenny Robb (Curator, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library, Ohio State)
and Maryanne Rhett (Comics Scholar; Professor of History and Anthropology, Monmouth
University). A White Paper Working Group consisting of the above professionals and
four librarians to be identified will meet in spring 2023 to finalize recommendations.
Our team also includes SDSU students and the graphic recording firm, A Visual Approach.
Pamela Jackson
Pamela Jackson has been a library faculty member in the California State University
system since 2002. She is the Comic Arts Curator in Special Collections and University
Archives at San Diego State University, and the Founding Co-Director of SDSU’s Center
for Comics Studies in the College of Arts and Letters. She is also the archivist for
San Diego Comic Fest. Pam manages a comic arts collection of approximately 100K published,
archival, and ephemeral items. She co-created Comics@SDSU (now the Center for Comics
Studies), where she works to include comics in the curriculum and foster the next
generation of comics scholars. She has written numerous articles about comics and
pop culture for academic publications and has presented at Comic-Con International,
San Diego Comic Fest, and the Popular Culture Association. Pam was honored to serve
as a judge for the 2021 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. She has an MA in English
with an emphasis on Creative Writing from Sonoma State University, an MA in Library
and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a Professional
Certificate in Rare Books and Manuscripts from the California Rare Book School at
UCLA.
Elizabeth Pollard
Dr. Elizabeth Pollard is Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence at San Diego
State University, where she has been teaching courses in Roman History, World History,
and witchcraft studies since 2002. She co-leads the Comics @ SDSU collaborative (2019-present)
and is co-Champion of Comics and Social Justice for the SDSU President’s Big Ideas Initiative (2020-present). Pollard recently debuted
a new Comics and History course that explores sequential art from the paleolithic
to the present day. Her research investigates women accused of witchcraft in the Roman
world and explores the exchange of goods and ideas between the Mediterranean and the
Indian Ocean in the early centuries of the Common Era. She is currently working on
a graphic history exploring the influence of classical understandings of witchcraft
on modern pop-culture representations of witches (from comics to film). Apart from
her work on magic and comics, Pollard is co-author of Worlds Together Worlds Apart Concise, WTWA Full 6th edition, and the Worlds Together Worlds Apart, Companion Reader (W.W. Norton). In Summer 2020, she co-facilitated the SDSU Flexible Course Design
Institute, which undertook the training of more than 1,000 SDSU faculty as they made
the shift to online instruction in the face of COVID-19. She has also published on
various pedagogical and digital history topics, including writing about witchcraft
on wikipedia, tweeting on the backchannel of the large lecture, and digital humanities
approaches to visualizing Roman History.
Jenny Robb
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.
Maryanne A. Rhett
Dr. Maryanne A. Rhett, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and World History at Monmouth University, works on topics related to modern Middle Eastern and Islamic history at the intersections of popular culture, nationalism, and world history. Her teaching duties, too, reflect these interests. Some of her classes include Islamic history, Modern Middle Eastern history, Popular Culture and the Middle East, and the history of Militant Nationalism. Additionally, she teaches the Perspectives class: A Graphic World: World History and Sequential Art. Dr. Rhett is Secretary for the World History Association as well as the WHA’s program committee chairman. She has arranged programs for the Mid-Atlantic World History Association, the World History Association, and the Monmouth University Biennial Conference on Race. In 2019, Rhett authored Representations of Islam in United States Comics, 1880-1922.
A Visual Approach
A Visual Approach is a woman-founded firm specializing in graphic recording, group facilitation, and
strategic illustration. A Visual Approach is co-directed by Hope Tyson and Jaclyn Gilstrap and is based in Durham, North Carolina.