News Review Correspondents

Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto: Correspondent for Japan

Jessica Bauwens-Sugimoto is a postdoctoral research associate at Kyoto Seika University International Manga Research Center (IMRC). She came to Japan after completing degrees in Japanese Studies and Anthropology at Leuven Catholic University, and in 2007 received her Ph.D. (in Humanities) from Osaka University. Her research focuses on issues of gender and ethnicity in Manga, Comics, and media fandoms, covering yaoi, cosplay, fashion, dolls, and censorship. She is also active as a translator and teaches courses in Media Studies and Popular Culture at several universities in the Kansai area.

Bart Beaty: Correspondent for Canada

Bart Beaty is Professor and Head of the Department of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of several books including Fredric Wertham and Critique of Mass Culture (2005), Canadian Television Today (2006), Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (2007), David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2008) and Comics Versus Art (2012). He has translated books by Thierry Groensteen (The System of Comics (2007)), Jean-Paul Gabilliet (Of Comics and Men (2010)), and Thierry Smolderen (The Birth of the Comics (forthcoming, 2012)). He is the editor of the eight volumes of The Salem Encyclopedia of Graphic Novels (2012-2013). He is currently at work on a project, funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, examining intermediality in the artistic practice of comics artists. He is a columnist for The Comics Journal and his writing appears regularly on ComicsReporter.com

Michele Brittany: Correspondent for North America

Michele is an independent transmedia scholar with a focus on spy/espionage. She graduated from the University of Washington Tacoma with an interdisciplinary master’s degree in film studies. For the past two years she has been serving as the area chair of James Bond Franchise and Eurospy in Popular Culture for the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association’s annual conference. She is currently editing her first anthology with a working title of Spyfi & Superspies: A Collection of Essays Analyzing the Cultural Response to the James Bond Phenomenon (due out in 2015). She is also a popular culture photographer at comic book conventions.

Rikke Platz Cortsen: Correspondent for Scandinavia

Rikke Platz Cortsen handed in her PhD thesis at University of Copenhagen’s Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, August 2012. It was titled: ‘Comics as Assemblage – How Time and Space is Constructed in Comics’. She has published several articles on various aspects of comics scholarship and has presented papers on many international conferences. She is an editor of Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art (SJoCA) and is a founding member of Nordic Network for Comics Research (NNCORE).

Shelley Culbertson: Correspondent for Ireland

Shelley Culbertson is a PhD researcher in the Centre for Media Research at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland. She holds a BA in Media Studies and a Masters of Research in Genders and Sexuality within Sequential Art. Her thesis topic is “A Psychoanalytical Analysis of Pre-Oedipal and Oedipal Representations of Selected Comic Book Heroines”. She is currently working on an article discussing the unconscious fascination with death and displacement within Irish mythic narrative and the impact such story telling has had on the comic creators in N Ireland. Her particular interest is in the up and coming London Derry based Zombie Hi! series.

Martin de la Iglesia: Correspondent for Germany

Martin de la Iglesia studied Art History and Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 2007 he wrote his Master’s Thesis in London on the reception of US comics in the United Kingdom. Since 2011 he is a PhD student at Universität des Saarlandes (dissertation topic: the early reception of manga in the West). Currently he works as a librarian in Göttingen, Germany. His fields of interest in research include comics, art geography, reception history and aesthetics, and art historical methodology. All of his publications are available in Open Access. He blogs at http://650centplague.wordpress.com/

Nicolas Labarre: Correspondent for France

Nicolas Labarre is an assistant professor (maître de conférences) at University Bordeaux 3, France. He has worked on mass culture theories, but his current research focuses on issues of adaptation, genre, narrative constraints, and cultural legitimacy in comics. He is a regular contributor to The Comics Grid. He also draws and writes comics, mostly pubished on his blog (http://agrandstraits.blogspot.com).

Luka Ostojić: Correspondent for Croatia

Luka Ostojić holds a BA in Sociology and Comparative Literature from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. He is a freelance journalist working for Booksa.hr, Zarez, Kulturpunkt and HTV (a public TV broadcaster). He is writing political comments, short stories and academic articles. He is also volunteering as a debate trainer. His field of interest is interpreting superhero comic books as modern political narratives.

Mihaela Precup: Correspondent for Romania

Mihaela Precup is an Assistant Professor in the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest, Romania. Her main research interests include trauma studies, autobiographical comics, and family photography. She is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship with the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale University (2006-2007). She edited a volume of essays entitled American Visual Memoirs after the 1970s. Studies on Gender, Sexuality, and Visibility in the Post-Civil Rights Age (Bucharest: Bucharest University Press, 2010).

Moray Rhoda: Correspondent for South Africa

Moray Rhoda is a Cape Town based designer and illustrator and founder of Igubu Comics Collective. After leaving Igubu he self-published two Clockworx comics and co-organised Comics Brew 2006 with Grant Muller. Moray was the art director at Media 24′s Beat Comics studio, producing the comics Unicity, Mzansi Beats and Kasiwash. The studio was shut down in 2006. He is currently self-publishing a South Africa/Australia collaboration graphic novel anthology, Velocity (www.gaining-velocity.com). Since 2012 Moray has been involved with organizing Co/Mix @ Open Book, an annual SA event giving the public an opportunity to meet and support some of SA’s best cartoonists, illustrators and comic artists.

Greice Schneider: Correspondent for Brazil

Greice Schneider is currently conducting PhD research on boredom and everyday life in contemporary graphic novels at the Department of Literature at K.U. Leuven in Belgium and holds a fellowship from the Brazilian Ministry of Education (CAPES/MEC). Her main interests lie in the field of visual studies, with particular interest in the relations between image and narrative. She is a founding member of The Comics Grid. She is on the editorial board of Image [&] Narrative.

Lisa Tannahill: Correspondent for France

Lisa Tannahill is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow, where she also gained her MA (Hons) in French and Spanish. Her research focuses on representations of French minority cultures in francophone bande dessinée: particularly Brittany and the Bretons, but also including areas such as Corsica. Her research interests include pre-1945 bande dessinée, European minority languages and regional identities.

Lim Cheng Tju: Correspondent for Singapore/South-East Asia

Lim Cheng Tju is an educator who writes about history and popular culture in Singapore. His articles have appeared in the Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, Journal of Popular Culture and Print Quarterly. He is the country editor (Singapore) for the International Journal of Comic Art and also the co-editor of Liquid City 2, an anthology of Southeast Asian comics published by Image Comics. He is one of the authors of The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity (Amsterdam University Press).

Lida Tsene: Correspondent for Greece

Lida Tsene holds a PhD from Panteion University, Department of Communication, Media and Culture. Apart from academic books on corporate and media responsibility, social media and cultural management, she reads loads of comics. She tries to share everything she learns, and thatʼs why she participates in many conferences about CSR, journalism, social media and comics and also organizes educational workshops. She likes to talk a lot about the things she is passionate about, so she is collaborating as teaching associate with several academic institutions. She is also Public Relations, Art and Educational Director of Comicdom Press. She believes in the power of networks, thatʼs why she has friends all over the world.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/lida-tsene/b/999/2a4

Asta Vrečko: Correspondent for Slovenia

Asta Vrečko (Slovenia) is a PhD student of Art History, at the Faculty of Arts and a junior researcher at the Department of Art Pedagogy, Faculty of Pedagogy, University of Ljubljana. She contributes art critiques to several Slovenian magazines and is actively involved in various non-governmental initiatives in Ljubljana. She is a member of advisory board of the Workers’ and Punks’ University; editorial board of online art history publication published by Slovene Art History Society and of editorial board of Borec, Journal for History, Anthropology and Literature.

Peter Wilkins: Correspondent for Canada

Peter Wilkins works for The Training Group at Douglas College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a founding editor of the comics blog Graphixia with David N. Wright. He has a PhD in American Literature and Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine.