Julian Chambliss
Professor of English Michigan State University
- East Lansing MI
Julian Chambliss' research interests focus on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces.
Media
Biography
He is a co-editor and contributor for Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience, a book examining the relationship between superheroes and the American Experience (2013). His book on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural, and Geopolitical Domain, was published in 2018. His recent essays on comics have appeared in More Critical Approaches to Comics (2019) and The Ages of Black Panther (2020). His exhibition for the MSU Museum, Beyond the Black Panther: Vision of Afrofuturism in American Comics, explores Afrofuturist theme comics produced in the United States. His comics and digital humanities projects include The Graphic Possibilities OER, an open educational resource focused on comics, and Critical Fanscape, a student-centered critical-making project focused on communities connected to comics in the United States. He also serves as faculty lead for Comics as Data North America (CaDNA), an ongoing collaborative project at Michigan State University that uses library catalog data to explore North American comic culture. His most recent open-access book, Making Sense of Digital Humanities: Transformations and Interventions in Technocultures, offers a thematic roadmap to teaching digital humanities. His comic history exhibitions include Take Off! Comic Artists from the Great White North (2019), Comics and the City (2020), and Justice for All: Social Justice in Comics (2022).
An interdisciplinary scholar, he continually seeks ways to bridge teaching, scholarship, and service to understand space, place, and identity better. His work embraces Black digital humanities and Critical Afrofuturist frameworks.
Industry Expertise
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Florida Historical Society Hampton Dunn New Media Award
2019
Florida Historical Society Hampton Dunn Internet Award
2019
Julian Pleasant Fellow, Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP), University of Florida
2017
Education
University of Florida
Ph.D.
United States History
2003
University of Florida
M.A.
United States History
1997
Jacksonville University
B.S.
History
1994
Affiliations
- Comics as Data North America (CaDNA) : Faculty Lead
- The Graphic Possibilities OER
- Critical Fanscape
News
Afrofuturism and Black culture explored in new documentary by MSU professors
MSU Today online
2023-06-09
To help answer the question of what Afrofuturism is, Michigan State University Professor of English Julian Chambliss talked with experts around the country about the innovative movement for “Afrofantastic: The Transformative World of Afrofuturism,” a new Public Broadcasting Service documentary.
‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ continues the series’ quest to recover and celebrate lost cultures
The Conversation online
2022-11-11
As someone who teaches and writes about Afrofuturism, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” I’m particularly excited about the introduction of Namor and the hidden kingdom of Talokan, which he leads.
The first “Black Panther” film adhered to a longstanding practice in Afrofuturist stories and art by engaging in what I call “acts of recovery” – the process of reviving and celebrating elements of Black culture that were destroyed or suppressed by colonization. This practice is often linked to “Sankofa,” an African word from the Akan tribe in Ghana that roughly translates to “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.”
Ask the Expert: MSU Professor Julian Chambliss on “What is Afrofuturism?”
Michigan State University College of Arts and Letters online
2022-06-02
“Afrofuturism” was first coined by author and culture critic Mark Dery in his 1993 essay, “Black to the Future.” Since then, Afrofuturism has grown as an artform, practice, methodology, and area of study. In this Ask the Expert piece, Michigan State University Professor Julian Chambliss delves into what Afrofuturism is as a practice, as well as ways it shows up in culture and artistic work, often most easily identified through the visual arts and music.
Journal Articles
National Monument Audit
Journal of American History2022
The National Monument Audit, created by Monument Lab in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is a significant attempt to wrestle with the implications of monument culture in the United States. In the last few years, protest and debate about memorials in the United States have been central to discussions of race, memory, and community in the United States. Significant decisions to remove monuments related to the Civil War across the nation have grabbed attention. Still, in recent years protests have occurred, connected to monuments depicting a wide array of historic figures and events. Numerous scholars have written about monuments, spurred by the genuine ways these objects shape public space.
Days of Future Past: Why Race Matters in Metadata
Genealogy2022
While marginalized as a juvenile medium, comics serve as an archive of our collective experience. Emerging with the modern city and deeply affected by race, class, and gender norms, comics are a means to understand the changes linked to identity and power in the United States. For further investigation, we turn to one such collective archive: the MSU Library Comics Art Collection (CAC), which contains over 300,000 comics and comic artifacts dating as far back as 1840. As noted on the MSU Special Collections’ website, “the focus of the collection is on published work in an effort to present a complete picture of what the American comics readership has seen, especially since the middle of the 20th century”.
Allan W. Austin and Patrick L. Hamilton. All New, All Different? A History of Race and the American Superhero
The American Historical Review2022
The goal of this work is synthesis as the authors weave together a careful consideration of racial ideology connected to the superhero. As they explain, the “embedded” nature of the superhero is both expressing racial attitude but also “promulgating [a] unique conception of race and ethnicity,” which makes it a worthy subject for study (14). Boldly, their goal is to move the consideration of race and the superhero forward by focusing on multiculturalism. They seek to move beyond our Black-white binary to consider “Native American, Asian Americans, Middle Easterners, and Latinx Americans” and to consider lesser-known text in addition to the big two of Marvel and DC (14).
