A few words of introduction…

I’m an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the beautiful city of Olomouc, in the Czech Republic. I’m happily occupying a little corner of the American Literature section of our department, where I teach courses on American and British history, comic book studies, medievalism, and late 19th or early 20th century American literature. My official university faculty member page can be seen here.

I used comics-based research methodologies (and other approaches!) to study medievalisms and history in general in comics, graphic novels, and popular media to come to a better understanding about how history is used in narrative. I hope to open conversations about how we tell narrativize history, how we tell stories through history, and how this impacts the ways popular media is used to teach history. 

Medieval history

My primary interest is the establishment and function of female monastic communities in the 12th and 13th centuries, especially around Central Europe. However, I am a history omnivore, and I’ll happily cut my teeth on a range of related topics, including the politics of sainthood or storytelling, like fables. One long-term side project is the creation of medieval Latin comics at Picta Manent. 

Comics studies

As much as I love reading comics, I love translating my thoughts into sequential art, and it is my great pleasure to be able to feature comics and graphic novels as a main part of my research. Incidentally, there’s no shortage of medievalisms to investigate in popular, contemporary comics! I’m also very interested in the creating of comics and comics scholarship as we grow as a field, which you can see some reflections on at Scholarship in Short.