People

Nicola Levell is an associate professor of museum and visual anthropology at UBC, Vancouver, and an award-winning independent curator. Her research and publications focus on exhibitions, collections history, public and performing arts, and storytelling.

Rush Dhillon is a scientist and a cartoonist, and he tries to blur those two realms. He especially enjoys translating concepts in biochemistry, physiology, and evolution into comics as a tangible zine for the purposes of broader consumption. During his many years spent as a research scientist, he has found cartoons are an effective tool for presenting findings with colleagues and the public. The ability to share his research and the research of others with a wider audience is exceptionally rewarding, and he feels it is incumbent upon scientists to tell the stories of the universe around us to everyone. Outside of science, he loves all things Vancouver (contemporary and historical) and bicycling, and it just so happens they take centre stage in many of his comics, as well!

Victoria Rahbar is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia School of Information. Rahbar’s research interests include cultural representation in manga, seeking out narratives around disability and neurodiversity, and manga in postsecondary education and academic library collections. She applies her research to the needs of libraries, speaking on manga for teen and adult readers at academic conferences and anime conventions. Other areas of interest include accessibility, censorship, localization, materiality, and the reading experience. Previously, she worked in academic libraries.

Gavin Paul teaches in the Arts One program, where he regularly puts graphic novels on the reading list. He has published on 9/11 and serialized comics, written numerous reviews of monographs on comics scholarship, and served on the Editorial Board for the Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels (2 vols, Greenwood 2010) and Comics Through Time: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas (4 vols, Greenwood 2014). He contributed over a dozen entries to both of these series.

Dr. Jason Lieblang is an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of CENES and the Director of First-Year and Interdisciplinary Programs in the Faculty of Arts. He has been fascinated by comics since he was a child, and has been teaching with and about them for over 15 years. He co-developed and now regularly teach his department’s course on the Graphic Novel in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe (CENS 308), and he has also been involved in bringing cartoonists and comics scholars Nick Sousanis and Paul Karasik to UBC for events. He find comics a valuable medium through which to improve students’ visual literacy and to make them aware of how important form is to understanding and appreciating culture.

Annick Pellegrin is a graduate of The University of Sydney. She is a columns and articles editor for Comics Forum and sits on the editorial board of Studies in Comics. Her research has been published in French, English and Spanish, most recently in Identity and History in Non-Anglophone Comics, Critical Approaches to Horror Comic Books and Trans Identities in the French Media. She also guest edited (with María Celina Bortolotto) an issue of Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research dedicated to the Argentine Roberto Fontanarrosa. She is currently working as a Sessional Lecturer in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies (FHIS) at UBC.

Charlotte Schallié is a Professor of Germanic Studies and Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria. Her teaching and research interests include memory studies, visual culture studies & graphic narratives, teaching and learning about the Holocaust, genocide and human rights education, community-engaged participatory research, and arts-based action research. Together with Andrea Webb, she is the project co-director of a 7-year SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant entitled “Visual Storytelling and Graphic Art in Genocide and Human Rights Education”

Andrea spent a decade as a high school teacher before returning to higher education as a teacher educator. Her research interests lie in teaching and learning in higher education, and she is involved in research projects related to Threshold concepts, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and Social Studies Teacher Education. Currently, Andrea is part of a multinational SSHRC-funded project, Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education.

Antje Ellermann (she/they) is a Professor of Political Science and Founding Director of the Centre for Migration Studies at UBC. Their research focuses on the politics of migration and citizenship in liberal democracies. They are particularly interested in the nexus between international migration and the politics of policymaking and implementation, coercive state power and migrant resistance; legal precarity; and the intersection of migration, settler colonialism, and Indigeneity.

Alessandra Santos is an associate professor of Film Studies at the University of British Columbia. She specializes in Latin American cinema, literature, and culture. Her interest areas are utopias, technology, visual culture, gender, race, and decolonial studies. Her publications include a book on the transnational/Mexican cult film The Holy Mountain (2017); and two co-edited interdisciplinary volumes on utopias in the Americas. Her current project is on Afrofuturism cinema in Brazil. Her research has been supported by multiple grants including a current SSHRC Insight Grant.

Luisa Canuto has been teaching language courses for UBC French, Hispanic and Italian Studies since 1994. In that same year, Luisa founded and then coordinated the Italian Program for UBC Continuing Studies, trained all the instructors, developed the curriculum for the program and created and led the UBC travel program in Italy. After winning the Killam Prize for excellence in teaching in 2000, she started working for the Centre for Teaching and Academic Growth (currently CTLT) as Faculty Associate and Manager, and developed educational programs for Faculty members, including Orientation events, Teaching and Learning Institutes and the Academic Leadership Development Program for new UBC Academic Leaders. She sat in the board of the Italian Cultural Centre for two years and developed and facilitated the teachers’ training program for the Centre.

Jennifer Nagtegaal is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where she likewise completed a master’s degree in Hispanic Studies in 2016. Jennifer’s research, funded by the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Doctoral Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), develops at the crossroads of cultural studies and contemporary Hispanic visual culture in the areas of comics studies and animation studies, and sometimes at the intersection of both.

Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta, Canada. He has had creative and critical work published in the Malahat Review, Arc Poetry, Canadian Literature, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. His teaching and research interests include Indigenous literatures, Indigenous theory & politics, Canadian literature, speculative fiction, settler colonial studies, and environmental justice. His children’s book, Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018, and his first collection of poetry, CREELAND, was published in 2022. Dallas’ newest collection, entitled Teeth, is out through Nightwood Editions in Spring of 2024.

Taylor Brown–Evans is a writer, illustrator and cartoonist living in Vancouver. His work has appeared in Geist, Matrix, Poetry is Dead, The Feathertale Review, Ricepaper Magazine as well as alternative press zines, chapbooks. His most recent project, Songs for a Lost Pod, is a comicbook collaboration with local songwriter Leah Abramson.

Toph Marshall is a professor in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on ancient performance traditions and the presentation of myth and the ancient world in modern popular media, especially comics. He is the co-editor with George Kovacs of Classics and Comics (OUP, 2011) and Son of Classics and Comics (OUP, 2016). His articles on comics have discussed adaptations of the Odyssey, representations of the Furies in Wonder Woman and Sandman, Hercules and the Incredible Hulk, with specific studies of works by Frank Miller, Dave Sim, Paul Hornschemeier, and Jonathan Hickman. He was the Academic Director of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF) from 2010–2016 and is a founding member of the Comic Studies Society. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2021.

Sarah Leavitt is a cartoonist and educator whose particular areas of interest include autobiographical comics, formal experimentation in comics, and comics pedagogy—developing strategies for teaching comics creation as well as exploring how comics creation shapes students’ work in other forms of writing.