Keynote Speaker
Grace D. Gipson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University
Grace D. Gipson, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the department of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA). As a Black future feminist/pop culture scholar, Dr. Gipson's area of research interest centers on black popular culture, digital humanities, representations of race and gender within comic books, Afrofuturism, and race and new media.
Grace's work has been featured in various publications and book chapters in such outlets as Huffington Post, NPR.org and Black Perspectives. Her current book project seeks to explore Black female identities as personified in comics and fandom culture. A second project examines how online Black female academic and popular networks produce cultural and technical capital, which act as safe spaces that showcase, interrogate, and celebrate the blending of popular culture and the academy.
Outside the classroom, you can find Grace collecting comic books and stamps on her international travel discoveries, participating as part of the #BlackComicsChat podcast crew and giving back to the community through a myriad of projects and organizations. You can also follow her on Twitter @GBreezy20.
No events at the moment
The Art of Storytelling:
Black Imaginings of Trauma, Politics and Pop Culture
2019 and 2020 served as a period of time filled with sadness and pain, protest, excitement, creativity, and truth-telling particularly for Black and Brown people. However, certain popular mediums (like film, television, and comics) have been providing spaces to engage with the past, present, and future in very effective ways. This talk will specifically [engage] with how certain television series (Watchmen, Lovecraft Country), films (Us, Antebellum), and comic book series (Bitter Root, Far Sector) serve as literal outlets of re-telling, re-sharing and remembering Black stories that are often minimized, mis-interpreted, or forgotten.