Faculty and Scholars

Our project team includes SDSU faculty with expertise in teaching comics and social justice-related topics and four non-SDSU experts with vital expertise in school/public libraries, banned books, comics creation, and museum education.

Elizabeth Pollard (Institute Co-director) 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 is founding co-director of SDSU’s Center for Comics Studies. Pollard designed and debuted the new Comics and History course that explores sequential art from the paleolithic to the present day and is currently working on two comics-related projects: an analysis of comics about ancient Rome over the last century and a graphic history exploring the influence of classical understandings of witchcraft on their representations in modern comics.  

Pamela Jackson (Institute Co-director), founding co-director of SDSU’s Center for Comics Studies, has been a library faculty member in the California State University system since 2002. She is the comic arts curator/librarian in Special Collections and University Archives at San Diego State University. She manages a comic arts collection of approximately 120K published, archival, and ephemeral items. As founding co-director for the Center for Comics Studies, Jackson works to include comics in the curriculum and to foster the next generation of comics scholars. 

Katie Sciurba (Institute K-12 Leader), associate professor of literacy education at San Diego State University, is the anchor and resource for participants’ lesson plan construction. Sciurba is director of both the SDSU Literacy Center in City Heights and of the SDSU reading/literacy graduate programs. Sciurba’s K-12 experience – as an elementary school teacher who has taught writing to K-12 children in after-school and intervention contexts for more than twenty years – will ensure that the college faculty sharing their ideas and the K-12 teachers operationalizing that content for their own students will be speaking the same language. 

 

Additional project faculty (SDSU)

Michael Domínguez is associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies, with a focus on youth studies and education. Previously a middle school English and ESL teacher in North Las Vegas, Nevada, Domínguez earned his Ph.D. in education with a graduate certificate in ethnic studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder. While at CU, Domínguez served as co-founder and director for UMAS y MEXA de CU Boulder’s Aquetza Program, focused on supporting decolonial and expansive learning for Chican@ youth and pre-service teachers through Chican@ Studies programming. 

Ajani Brown is a lecturer in SDSU’s Africana Studies Department. Brown proposed and developed the cutting edge course, AfroFuturism, which is the interdisciplinary study of African and African American contributions to science fiction, comic book art, pop culture, and its origins and influences. And, Brown has recently developed AFRAS 475,Super Black: The Politics of Representation in Comics. Brown's research focus includes literacy through sequential art, ethnogothic horror in comics and graphic novels, the depiction of Black characters in comics as it applies to visual rhetoric, Afrofuturism and social justice/political themes in fiction, comics and graphic expressions, in addition to cultural studies of the African diaspora.  

Desmond Hassing (Choctaw of Oklahoma) is a lecturer in SDSU’s American Indian Studies Department. Hassing brings to bear his roles as performance artist, theatrical director, education professional, and researcher for his work on American Indian representations in media (with a focus in comic books), site specific theatre, and ideological trends in popular media. Hassing developed AMIND 235, Indians in Comic Books and Graphic Arts.  

Jess Whatcott is an interdisciplinary scholar working in critical disability studies, critical prison studies, queer studies/queer of color critique, political economy, American political development, and California history. In addition to their appointment in the Department of Women’s Studies, Whatcott is affiliated with LGBTQ+ studies and digital humanities. Whatcott recently developed LGBT 550,Queering Comics.  

Bill Nericcio is director of San Diego State University's longest-running interdisciplinary and cultural studies graduate program, MALAS (the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences program). He is also Professor of English and comparative literature at SDSU, where he also serves on the faculties of Chicana and Chicano Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies. A long-time user of comics in his courses, Nericcio teaches ENG 157, Comics and History, and recently developed ECL568,Chicanx Comix: Community, Storytelling, and Social Justice.

Bradford Kirkegaard received his B.A. in comparative religion from Harvard University and Ph.D. in study of religion from the University of Pennsylvania and has been an award-winning lecturer in the Department for the Study of Religion at SDSU since 2008. He teaches courses on the Bible, Christianity, Death Dying, and the Afterlife, and Evil.  A long time participant in the Center for Comics Studies working group, Kirkegaard is preparing a course on religion in/of comics. 

J. Van Tarpley is a lecturer in history and earned his single-subject social studies credential from SDSU. Tarpley brings to his extensive teaching of comics his global background (grew up in Nigeria and lived for extended periods of time in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and China). Tarpley has taught many sections of HIST 157, Comics and History, and designed HIST 457, Graphic Historywith an emphasis on comics and graphic histories that explore social justice issues.

 

Additional, non-SDSU Partners

Non-SDSU partners who will guide other educational activities include: Emily Schindler (Education Director, Comic-Con Museum), Moni Barrette (President of ALA GNCRT; co-founder of the nonprofit Creators Assemble! Inc; Director of Collection Development and Publisher Relations for Library Pass (ComicsPlus database); Little Fish Comic Book Studio’s Mark Habegger, a local comic book studio and educational nonprofit dedicated to developing the skills and empowering the minds of students of all ages who are interested in the comic artform; and Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s Rep TBN, “a non-profit organization dedicated to the protection of the First Amendment rights of the comics art form” with whom the project directors have collaborated on many Comic-Con panels.

 

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