Information About Contributors

Erin Kathleen Bahl is Associate Professor of Applied and Professional Writing at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as the KSU English Department's inaugural Social Media and Branding Coordinator. Her work focuses on creating knowledge, telling stories, and designing for access via digital scholarship, webcomics, folklore, and interactive narrative. Her publications include scholarly and creative work in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; Computers and Composition Online Journal; enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture; Technical Communication Quarterly; The Digital Review; Graphic RHM; The Digital Rhetoric Collaborative; Composition Studies; Humanities Journal; Journal of American Folklore; and Folklife Magazine.Ayanni C. H. Cooper is Program Manager, Member Engagement and Professional Development at the Modern Language Association. Her research interests include visual rhetoric, including comics and animation, monster theory, gender and sexuality studies, speculative fiction, erotica, and the study/creation of multimodal texts. Her work can be found in scholarly and public forums, including in The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film (2025); Horror Comics and Religion: Essays on Framing the Monstrous and the Divine (2025), and in the Los Angeles Review of Books. She cohosts and produces the podcast Sex. Love. Literature., which covers how and why representations of sex, love, and desire in popular culture matter.Jennifer A. Dickinson received her PhD in Anthropology and an MA in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Michigan. She is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont. Her research areas intersect with issues related to language and identity in Ukraine, including language ideology and writing systems, regional identity and representations of dialect speech, and Ukrainian Sign Language and national identity. She has been following the publication and development of Ukrainian comics since the 2010s for her own enjoyment and in relation to her interest in popular media and public representations of Ukrainian identity.Nic Hartmann is a Halifax-based folklorist, comic artist, and first-year Master of Divinity student at the Atlantic School of Theology. A third-generation comic artist, he has been creating comic material for most of the last 20 years while working as a public folklorist, museum studies professor, and nonprofit director. He currently draws for Folk, Draw, Write, Repeat (a monthly zine about the intersection of folklife, art, and disability) under the pen name Nico-Maria.Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway is Professor of Anthropology at Oberlin College. Her research addresses the flexible multimodal nature of communicative practices as well as the social factors that facilitate or limit that flexibility. She explores these dynamics through ethnographic work with deaf signers in Nepal, Malta, Germany, and the United States, as well as by experimenting with the modalities and genres through which anthropological research can be produced and shared. She is the author of Signing and Belonging in Nepal (2016), which was awarded an Honorable Mention for the Society of Linguistic Anthropology's Edward Sapir Prize in 2016.Andy Kolovos is a Vermont-based folklorist, ethnographic archivist, and comic nerd. Since 2002, he has held a variety of roles at Vermont Folklife, where he currently serves as associate director and archivist. He holds a PhD in Folklore and Ethnomusicology and a Master of Library Science from Indiana University, and is a cofounder of the Non-Fiction Comics Festival, held every November at the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington, Vermont.Cricket Malament is a graduate student in folklore and public culture at the University of Oregon. They have presented at Western States Folklore Society and taught workshops on “telling your story through comics.” They are an avid mushroom forager and proudly embrace their identity as a multimodal visual artist usually working in crochet, macramé, illustration, and watercolor.Kacy McKinney is Artist-Scholar in Residence at the Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative at Portland State University. She is the creator of Changing the Narrative: Stories of Student Homelessness and Housing Instability (2021), which was short-listed for the Graphic Medicine Award in 2023. Her work in research-based comics includes editing the comic book Uprooted: Voices of Student Homelessness (2024); and comics creation with coauthor Daren Todd in their current project Ink & Impact: Stories of Street Newspaper Vendors, in collaboration with Street Roots.Daniel Peretti grew up reading comic books and hasn't changed much. He is Associate Professor in the Folklore Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, where he teaches courses on legends, mythology, and folklore and popular culture. He researches festivals and holidays associated with legends and material culture. He published Superman in Myth and Folklore (2017), as well as several articles about legends, holidays, and comic books, all of which he hopes will culminate in a wide-ranging study of Santa Claus. Surprisingly, he is sometimes asked to consult on the images put on coins by the Royal Canadian Mint.Bernard C. Perley is Wolastokwiyik Nekwotkuk (a member of the Maliseet Nation from Tobique First Nation, New Brunswick, Canada). He teaches courses at the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies (CIS) at the University of British Columbia. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. The knowledge and experience gained from the three programs have contributed significantly to his writing and advocacy for revitalizing Indigenous languages, cultures, and identities as place-based interdependencies. He has published broadly on topics ranging from Indigenous language endangerment and language revitalization to anthropology and global Indigenous studies theory and practice. And he loves drawing comics.Sally Pirie is Professor of Child and Family Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Education. An award-winning newspaper cartoonist and an anthropologist of childhood and infancy, she received her PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is a graduate of Punahou School and Grinnell College. Her areas of expertise include comics-based research methods, ethnographic research, and gender-diverse childhoods. She served two terms as editor in chief of Anthropology and Education Quarterly, was an editor at Jeunessse, and is currently a member of the editorial collective for Pedagogy, Culture and Society. She serves as an executive board member for Folk, Knowledge, Place. She was the 2020 Distinguished Visiting Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, Morris, and the 2021 recipient of the Grinnell College Alumni Award in recognition of her lifetime of public service. A member of the National Book Artists Association, she is the author of the groundbreaking comic research methods comic series Shane, under her previous surname Galman. She is Director of the Comics-Based Research Lab at the University of Massachusetts.Sandra Mizumoto Posey is still seeking to cram joy into every moment. She earned her PhD in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently Professor in the Gender Institute for Teaching and Advocacy at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Her work has appeared in Western Folklore; Folklore Forum; Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies; Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal; Mid-American Review; and volumes published by the University Press of Mississippi; University Press of Kentucky; Routledge; Pearson; and Anchor Books.Promina Shrestha (Lakheni) is an illustrator, comics artist, and researcher in the visual arts, and is currently focusing on her own creative projects while living and farming in Nepal. She is the cofounder of Virangana Comics and is deeply passionate about exploring themes of identity politics and mental health and working with children. She has contributed to the field of visual research through publications such as “Children's Illustration in Nepal: An Imagined Identity” in the Journal of Illustration (2016) and “Nepali Women in Comics” in Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics (2020).