Contributors
- Contributors
RACHEL E. BLACKBURN is a PhD student at the University of Kansas, where she also serves as an instructor for acting and public speaking courses in the Theatre Department. Rachel's research interests live at the intersection of performance, stand-up comedy, gender, and race. She pursues comedy, great theater, music, and travel, having worked in the theaters of London, Dublin, and Toronto.
BEN CLICK is Professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland, director of the Writing and Speaking Center, and director of the Mark Twain Lecture Series on American Humor & Culture. With Lawrence Howe and James Caron, he coedited and contributed to Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts (2013). His current research explores the rhetorical effects of silence in the works of Mark Twain. He is also working on a book that examines humor as a rhetorical strategy in environmental writing, a genre that is sometimes seen as taking itself too seriously.
EVAN COOPER is Associate Professor of sociology at Farmingdale State College. His research focuses on representations of minority groups in the mass media, particularly in comic forms. In addition to several articles on audience reception of comic forms, his writings treat differences in the depictions of Gentile and Jewish women on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
MICHAEL DALEBOUT is a PhD student at University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Rhetoric.
JESSE DORST is a history PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation explores humor as a mechanism for translating abstract, dramatic changes in the early modern Atlantic world into useful information for daily life. [End Page 152]
MICHAEL EPP is an associate professor of English literature and cultural studies at Trent University. His research addresses the relationships among texts, violence, and publics in the United States and Ireland.
SAM HARRIS is a graduate student in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Northern Iowa.
RYAN ERIK MCGEOUGH is an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Northern Iowa.
MATTHEW R. MEIER (Bowling Green State University) is an assistant professor of communication studies at West Chester University. He studies the relationships among rhetoric, comedy, and democracy.
JEFFREY MELTON is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Alabama. He is author of Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001) and coeditor of Mark Twain on the Move: A Travel Reader (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009). He has published articles on travel writing, humor, and tourism in various scholarly journals including the Mark Twain Journal, South Atlantic Review, Studies in American Humor, and Studies in Travel Writing.
BRUCE MICHELSON, Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Illinois, is past president of the American Humor Studies Association, past president of the Mark Twain Circle of America, and 2014 Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the University of Antwerp. His books include Literary Wit (2001), Mark Twain on the Loose (1995), and Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution (2006).
DIEGO A. MILLAN received his doctorate from Tufts University and is currently Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University's Pembroke Center. He is working on his first book, tentatively titled Laughter's Fury: The Double-Bind of Black Laughter, which examines how enduring legacies of racism inform sociocultural understandings and practices of laughter. He has presented on topics such as the deconstruction of racial [End Page 153] whiteness through voice in Frank Webb's The Garies and Their Friends and Black solidarity through laughter in the work of Chester Himes. He has work forthcoming in South Atlantic Review and PMLA.
TERESA PRADOS-TORREIRA is Associate Professor of History at Columbia College Chicago. Her teaching areas include American cultural history, graphic humor, and political satire. She is the creator of the Paula Pfeffer Political Cartoon Contest, which has been running since 2002 at her institution. She has judged many political cartoon competitions, including the Fischetti and the Robert F. Kennedy Awards. Her research areas include American and Cuban history. She is the author of Mambisas: Rebel Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (2005) and is currently working on a...
