Grant Team

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. 

 

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.