Charli Brown
Charli Brown is a recent graduate of UBC’s MA in Children’s Literature program. She researches how gender, sexuality, and disability intersect with youth pop culture, especially fairy tales and monster media. As Senior Program Assistant, Charli assists the Pop Culture Cluster with administration and communications.
Elizabeth Nijdam
Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where she lives, works and learns on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
Before joining the faculty at UBC and returning home to Vancouver, she taught at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington (2018-2019) and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Freie Universität in Berlin (2017-2018). She graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2017.
Biz’s research and teaching examine the representation of history in comics, comics and new media on forced migration, intersections between Indigenous studies and German, European, and migration studies, and feminist methodologies in the graphic arts.
At UBC, she leads the Narratives Research Group in the UBC Centre for Migration Studies and founded and co-leads the recently established Comic Studies Research Cluster in UBC’s Public Humanities Hub. Biz is also the Equity Chair for German Studies Canada and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum and the Executive Board of the Comics Studies Society.
She is currently completing her book manuscript, Graphic Historiography: Teaching History & Memory through Comics and Graphic Novels (Ohio State University Press), which she began as a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo (2019-2021).
Cal Smith
Cal Smith is a Ph.D. student in UBC’s English Language and Literatures Department. His doctoral research explores queer comics/zines in Canada in the 1980s and 90s. He’s also a GRA with the Pop Culture Cluster (PopCC) and Survivor-Centered Visual Narratives (SCVN).
Sydney Lines
Sydney Lines (she/her/hers) has several years experience working in higher education, arts and cultural spaces, and in various kinds of cultural programming. She is a multifaceted creative thinker who loves big ideas, memorable stories, and gathering communities through participation in arts and culture. Sydney is currently a PhD Candidate in UBC English and a UBC Public Scholar who serves on the Advisory Board for the UBC Public Humanities Hub and supports the Digital Scholarship in Arts initiative. She has graduate training in literary, art historical, and museum studies (MA, English Literature and MA, Creative Enterprise and Cultural Leadership). Her research interests include the long, transatlantic 19th century and its effects with emphasis on North American empire, race, and nationalism; Norse mythology and Scandinavian studies; North American Icelandic diasporic studies; women’s writing and artmaking; museums; digital humanities; and public arts and culture.