Comics and the U.S. South

About the Contributors

325 About the Contributors Tim Caron is the associate dean of the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York. He earned his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. His research and teaching interests include comics and graphic novels and the intertwined issues of race and religion in writers from the American South. Brannon Costello is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University , where he specializes in southern literary studies and comics studies. He has published essays on authors including Jack Butler, Randall Kenan, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright, and he is the author of Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945–1971 (Louisiana State UP, 2007) and the editor of Howard Chaykin: Conversations (UP of Mississippi, 2011). His ongoing research projects include a critical study of Chaykin’s work and an examination of the role of “geek culture” in contemporary southern fiction. Brian Cremins is an assistant professor of English at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. He earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Connecticut in 2004 and has contributed essays on comics to publications including the International Journal of Comic Art and The Jack Kirby Collector . His current project involves a study of depersonalization, memory, and mourning in the works of John Porcellino and Carrie McNinch. He lives in Chicago. Conseula Francis, associate professor of English and director of African American studies at the College of Charleston, earned her Ph.D. at the University of Washington. Her research interests include African American genre fiction and black intellectual thought. She is the editor of Conversations with Octavia Butler (UP of Mississippi, 2009) and the author of the forthcoming An Honest Man and a Good Writer: The Critical Reception of James Baldwin. About the Contributors 326 Anthony Dyer Hoefer was recently named director of the University Scholars Program at George Mason University, where he also teaches undergraduate seminars in the Honors College. He lives in Virginia with his family. M. Thomas Inge is the Blackwell Professor of Humanities at RandolphMacon College, where he teaches and writes about American humor and comic art, film and animation, southern literature and culture, William Faulkner, and Asian literature. He has been publishing essays and books on comics for over thirty years, including Comics as Culture (1990), and more recently an edition of My Life with Charlie Brown (2010) by Charles Schulz. Inge is the general editor of the Great Comics Artists and the Conversations with Comic Artists series for the University Press of Mississippi. He wanted to be a cartoonist but got diverted into teaching. Nicolas Labarre received his Ph.D. from the Université de Haute-Bretagne, in Rennes,and he is currently an assistant professor at the Université Michel de Montaigne in Bordeaux.After a few years dedicated to the study of mass culture theories,he has shifted his interest to comic books and cultural hierarchies . He also writes children’s books. Alison Mandaville teaches literature and writing at Pacific Lutheran University . Her articles on comics have appeared in the International Journal of Comics Literature, the Comics Journal, Philology, and the book Teaching the Graphic Novel (MLA, 2009). She received a Fulbright lectureship to Azerbaijan in 2007–08, where she explored contemporary literature and comic art of the region. Gary Richards, assistant professor of English at the University of Mary Washington,is the author of Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961 (Louisiana State UP, 2005) and a contributor to Beth Henley:A Casebook (Routledge,2002) and Faulkner’s Sexualities (UP of Mississippi , 2010). He has also published essays addressing regional and sexual identity in the works of Alfred Uhry, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Allan Gurganus, and Jim Grimsley, among others. His current scholarship focuses on literary representations of gay New Orleans and on images of the U.S. South in contemporary musical theater. Joseph Michael Sommers is an assistant professor of English at Central Michigan University where he teaches courses in children’s and young adult About the Contributors 327 literature. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and has published essays on figures such as Gary Paulsen, Hunter Thompson, Denise Levertov, and Judy Blume. Over the next year he will bring out chapters and articles on the culture of children in nineteenth-century lady’s journalism, the maturation of Marvel Comics’ characters in the Post 9/11 Moment, and Twilight. His...