Podcast talk about Unstable Masks

I was recently interviewed by political scientist and historian Lilly Goren for the New Books Network, about Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics.

New York & Comics Course

There's still time to sign up for the course I'm giving on New York and comics at the Gotham Center for New York City History. We'll be dealing with matters large and small pertaining to the ways the city has been imagined and portrayed, what that means, and how it connects to the city's history …

New Course on Religion and Comics

This week, all the Is have finally been crossed and the Ts all dotted, meaning that this fall semester Malmö University will be offering a new course: In the course, we will be looking at how comics can be used to reinforce, reject, reconstruct, or manufacture meaning in relation to social formations and structures that …

New Course on NYC and Comics

Just got the news it's official! Come March I'll be teaching a short, non-credit course on New York City and comics at the Gotham Center for New York City History, at CUNY's Graduate Center, where I spent three years doing research on the topic. (I'll be doing it online, of course.) Description follows below. Cover …

Isn’t it Interesting? On Choosing Texts

Simply put, some "it" doesn't proactively catch our eye but, instead, our eye catches it!Russell T. McCutcheon, "Religion" in Theory and Practice (p. 9) Yesterday I participated in a "brown bag lunch" event (over Zoom) with some urban studies scholars. Through the usual twists and turns of academia, I had been invited to talk a …

On Boycotting Toys: Public “Nerd Rage” and a Mythology of Superheroic Authenticity

I always find it interesting to see pundits evoke history in ways that lose touch with the past and present alike. It’s a fairly common form of rhetoric that speaks volumes through omission, and it's fertile ground for myth-making. In an opinion piece from August 28th, after having seen a Spider-Man figure on a skateboard …

New York Isn’t Dead – New Yorkers Are Dying To Keep it Alive

'The work of people who don't have the luxury of complaining about Zoom fatigue keep us in that privileged place. And these are people who still don't have many choices beyond "work a dangerous job or starve on the street."'

Nell Irvin Painter’s History of White People

The critical study of whiteness is a rapidly growing field, but it still lacks in good introduction volumes. Much scholarship is rather specialized or focused on one group or era or phenomenon. Although ten years old, Painter’s book stands as an exception, providing an eminently readable introduction to the history of whiteness in the USAmerican context; it shouldn’t be the last book anyone reads on the subject, but it is a great first one for those hoping to learn more about how we got to where we are today.

Protected: New Publication: An essay in On The Stump #3

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Writing Again – It Feels Weird

Recently, when I've had some time free of other obligations, I have been working on a new book about the things we call superheroes and the ways we fill that label with meaning.