Education

Ph.D., Yale University, 2003
M.A., Yale University, 1999
B.A., Hampton University, 1996

Areas of Specialization

20th-Century African-American Literature and Culture
American Comics and Graphic Novels
Southern Literature

Recently Taught Courses

   • African American Literature
   • Introduction to Comics Studies
   • Race, Gender, and Graphic Novels
   • Slavery, Literature, and Culture
   • Young Adult Literature
   • Graphic Memoir
   • Invisible Man and American Culture

Professional Accolades

   • USC Russell Research Award in the Humanities & Social Sciences, 2022
   • Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work, 2020
   • Finalist, USC Farrar Award in Media & Civil Rights History, 2019
   • USC Department of English Research Professorship, 2016
   • USC English Department Teaching Award, 2012
   • Provost Humanities Grant, University of South Carolina, 2012
   • USC Institute for African American Studies Research Grant, 2010
   • NAACP Andrew Billingsley Faculty Award, University of South Carolina, 2004

Service to the Profession

   • Editor, Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society
   • Series Co-Editor, “Cultures of Resistance,” University of South Carolina Press
   • Chair, International Comic Arts Forum

Selected Publications 

BOOKS 
   • Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, Rutgers University Press, 2023
   • EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest. Rutgers University Press, 2019.
   • Comics and the U.S. South. Co-edited with Brannon Costello. University Press of Mississippi, 2012.
   • "A God of Justice?” The Problem of Evil in 20th Century Black Literature. University of Virginia Press, 2009.

CHAPTERS
   • “All-Negro Comics and Counter-Histories of Race in the Golden Age,” in Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, Rutgers University Press, 2023
   • Introduction to Black Panther (Penguin Classics Marvel Collection), Don McGregor, Rich Buckler, Billy Graham, et. al., Penguin Classics, 2022
   • “Blues Fallin’ Down Like Hail: Reading ‘The Sky is Gray’ as a Blues Narrative,” in MLA Series: Approaches to Teaching Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works. Ed. John Lowe and Herman Beavers, 2019.
   • “Comics and Emmett Till,” in Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics. Eds. Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis. University of Texas Press, 2017.
   • “The Blues Tragicomic: Constructing the Black Folk Subject in McCulloch and Hendrix’s Stagger Lee,” in The Blacker The Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Eds. Francis Gateward and John Jennings. Rutgers University Press, 2015.
   • “Black Culture, Speculative Fiction, and the Past as Text in Jeremy Love’s Bayou,” in Essays on Teaching With Graphic Narratives. Ed. Matthew L. Miller. McFarland Press, 2015.
   • “Of Slaves and Other Swamp Things: Black Southern History as Comic Book Horror,” Comics and the U.S. South. Eds. Qiana Whitted and Brannon Costello. University Press of Mississippi, 2012.

JOURNAL ARTICLES
   • “‘And the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics’: Comics, Visual Metonymy, and the Spectacle of Blackness,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5.1 (March 2014): 1-22.
   • “In My Flesh Shall I See God: Ritual Violence, Racial Redemption, and Countee Cullen’s ‘The Black Christ’,” African American Review, 38.3 (2004): 379-393.
   • “Using My Grandmother’s Life as a Model: Richard Wright and the Gendered Politics of Religious Representation,” Southern Literary Journal, 36.2 (2004): 13-30.

REVIEWS
   • “The Battle Scars of Angola Janga,” ASAP/J, Black One-Shot Series, 2020.
   • “To Flip and Move and Shine: Ebony Flowers’ Hot Comb,” The Comics Journal, Oct. 22, 2019.
   • “Slavery Was No Opera: Alyssa Cole’s An Extraordinary Union,” Public Books, 2017.
   • Review of Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century-Storytelling by Jared Gardner, Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, 42.2 (Spring 2013): 34-40.
   • Review of Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible by Katherine Clay Bassard, Religion & Literature, 43.1 (Spring 2011): 207-209.
   • Review of Middle Passage in Charles Johnson: Embracing the World. Ed. Nibir K. Ghosh and E. Ethelbert Miller. New Delhi: Authorspress. 2008.
   • Review of Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952-1998 by Tuire Valkeakari, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters (31:3) Summer 2008: 961-966.