During ComFor’s online members’ meeting on 15 July, 2024, the new managing comittee that had previously been elected via postal vote was confirmed.
Christina Meyer and Lukas R.A. Wilde ran again for the 1st and 2nd chair of the society. Arnold Bärtschi ran for the office of treasurer for the first time. Vanessa Ossa has stepped down from this position, which she held since 2020. During this time, she was not only extremely active as a member of the ComFor online editorial team but also as co-organizer of two ComFor annual conferences, “Comics and Agency – Actors, Publics, Participation” (October 2020, Tübingen) and “What Was, Is, and Will Comics Research Be – for Us?” (December 2023, Gleichen). She was and is also the editor of both freely accessible open access publications (the most recent of which is currently in preparation). We would like to thank Vanessa Ossa very much for her commitment to ComFor and for the important contribution to comics research that she has made through her work!
The new managing comittee consists of:
President
PD Dr. Christina Meyer has been a ComFor member since 2010. She is an American Studies scholar with a research focus on American newspaper comics of the late 19th century. She is currently visiting professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the FU Berlin. In November 2019 her monograph Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid was published by the Ohio State University Press (see publisher’s website), which was nominated for the 2020 Eisner Award in the category “Best Academic/Scholarly Work.” She is co-editor of New Perspectives on American Comic Books and Graphic Novels (a special issue of the journal Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2011) and Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (2013). For more information, please see her ComFor profile page.
Vice President
Associate Prof. Dr. Lukas R.A. Wilde has been a ComFor member since September 2012 and was in charge of the coordination of the ComFor website for many years. In 2018, he first joined the ComFor managing comittee as treasurer, since 2020 as Vice President. He works in the field of media studies where he submitted his Ph.D. thesis on the ‘mangaization’ of public spaces in Japan and the implementation of transmedial figures (kyara) in functional communication (Im Reich der Figuren, Cologne 2018), which was honored with the Roland-Faelske-Award. Since 2022 he is an Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. Moreover, he was co-organizer of two ComFor annual conferences (2020 and 2023) and supports Eve Jay in the organisation of Comic Solidarity (see Website) and is one of the initiators of the German Inclusive Comic Award of the Independent Scene GINCO (see Website). For more information, please see his ComFor profile page.
Treasurer
Dr. Arnold Bärtschi has been a ComFor member since 2020 and was elected to the board as treasurer in 2024. As a classical philologist, he wrote a dissertation on “Titans, Gigants, and Giants in Ancient Epic: A Literary-Theoretical Reinterpretation” (Heidelberg 2019). Since 2019, he has worked as a senior lecturer and executive council member at Ruhr University Bochum. In addition to the application of modern literary theories to ancient literature, his current research focuses on the reception of antiquity in modern media, with a particular focus on comics. Several essays and a monograph are in progress on the question of various transformations of antiquity in comics. More information can be found on his ComFor profile page.