Christopher Pizzino

Associate Professor, PhD Rutgers University 2008, specializes in Contemporary American Literature. His teaching and research interests include theory of the novel, image theory, comics and graphic narratives, and various genres of contemporary literature, film, and television. His scholarship has appeared in Postmodern Culture, ImageText, Extrapolation and PMLA, among other venues. His book Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature was published by the University of Texas Press in 2016. He recently completed several years of service on the executive committee of the MLA's Comics and Graphic Narratives forum. Publications include an essay on contemporary satirical comics in Comics Studies: Here and Now (Routledge, 2018), a chapter on Silver Age Marvel superhero comics in the Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (Cambridge UP, 2018), and a chapter on the legacy of censored mid-century comics in Comics Memory: Archives and Styles (Palgrave, 2018). Other recent and forthcoming pieces include a chapter on the phenomenology of the cartoon in the Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies (Oxford, 2019), an essay on connections between embodied comics reading and delinquency in the volume Critical Comics Studies (U of Mississippi Press, 2020), a chapter on the place of comics in contemporary US fiction in Novel-Seeming-Goods: The Contemporary Novel as Network (2020), and an entry on the concept of the gutter in Keywords in Comics (NYU Press, 2021).

A 2016 lecture on comics history and questions of delinquency can be found on YouTube.

A 2017 article on comics and traumatic witnessing can be read here.

A 2017 article on comics and animal studies can be read here.

Click here for an interview.