Biography
Margaret Galvan is an assistant professor of visual rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. Her archivally-informed research examines how visual culture operates within social movements and includes a first book, "In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s," forthcoming this fall with the University of Minnesota Press. She is a scholar of contemporary visual culture interested in how images are used for purposes of social justice.
Areas of Expertise (19)
Women in Print Movement
Queercore
Riot Grrrl
Grassroots Print Culture
Digital Humanities
Third-Wave Feminism
Grassroots and Queer Archives
Archives
Queer Art
Contemporary Visual Art
Women Artists
comics
Digital Archives
Second-Wave Feminism
Queer Theory
Social Movements
LGBTQ Culture and Movements
Zines
1980s-1990s Self-Publishing Movements
Media Appearances (3)
Animating Queerness Through Representation
Trash Mag online
2022-11-08
Every time a show has a queer character or relationship it immediately gets put at the top of my watch list. Queer cartoons especially because they're always so wholesome and pure – it’s always a shame when live-action TV shows portray queer people in a worse light compared to cartoons. Over the past few years, queer representation has become more prominent in Hollywood and media in general.
Excalibur #13: “The Marriage of True Minds”
Goshgollywow Podcast radio
2021-05-22
What do Gloria Anzaldúa, Donna Haraway, and Kitty Pryde have in common? Find out in this week’s discussion of Excalibur #13, “The Marriage of True Minds,” where Anna, Mav, and Andrew are graced by the intersectional insights of comics scholar & queer archives specialist Dr. Margaret Galvan!
Comics Education in Conversation: Margaret Galvan
Penguin Random House Education online
2021-05-14
She is finishing a book, In Visible Archives of the 1980s, under contract with the University of Minnesota Press, which examines how publishing practices and archives have shaped understandings of the visual within feminist and queer activism. In 2021-22, she will be an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center researching her second book about how American LGBTQ cartoonists in the 80s-90s formed community through comics.
Articles (3)
Finding Feminist Comics Histories in Grassroots Periodicals
American PeriodicalsMargaret Galvan
2022-11-02
This forum brings together six short essays that, in different ways, engage with the methodological and theoretical challenges and opportunities that are unique to the study of comics in periodical media. Focusing examples from different eras, genres, and types of publication, the contributions assembled here consider key concepts for the study of periodical comics, discuss the experimental aesthetics of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century graphic narratives, uncover forgotten subcultural histories of the art form...
Of Anthologies and Activism: Building an LGBTQ+ Comics Community
The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies ReaderMargaret Galvan
2022-09-10
Because local, grassroots periodicals were the publication spaces that fostered the development of LGBTQ cartoonists in 1970s-1990s America, many artists were disconnected from each other. My previous scholarship meditates on this separation and how cartoonists started to build networks of self-syndication that brought them into contact with other artists across the nation. Anthology series emerged as the method to knit together these artists.
Around 1987: Don Melia and HIV/AIDS Comics ON AUGUST 30, 2021
Comic Velocity: HIV & AIDS in ComicsMargaret Galvan
2021-08-30
In this essay, I recover the legacy and memory of British cartoonist Don Melia, who brought communities of artists together to advocate for LGBTQ people and those living with HIV/AIDS across his career, which notably included his creation of Matt Black (1986-1987) and his editing of Strip AIDS (1987), Heartbreak Hotel (1987-1988), and Buddies #1-2 (1991). My essay and the volume as a whole reprints some fairly rare American and British comics that deal with HIV/AIDS.
Social