Julian C. Chambliss

Biography

Julian C. Chambliss is a Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. In addition, he is the faculty lead for the Department of English Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop and a core participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR). His research interests focus on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. His recent writing has appeared in Scholarly Editing, Genealogy,  KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, and The Conversation US.

He is a co-editor and contributor for Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience, a book examining the relationship between superheroes and the American Experience (2013). His book on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural, and Geopolitical Domain, was published in 2018.  His recent essays on comics have appeared in More Critical Approaches to Comics (2019) and The Ages of Black Panther (2020). His exhibition for the MSU Museum, Beyond the Black Panther: Vision of Afrofuturism in American Comics, explores Afrofuturist theme comics produced in the United States. His comics and digital humanities projects include The Graphic Possibilities OER, an open educational resource focused on comics, and Critical Fanscape, a student-centered critical-making project focused on communities connected to comics in the United States. He also serves as faculty lead for Comics as Data North America (CaDNA), an ongoing collaborative project at Michigan State University that uses library catalog data to explore North American comic culture. His most recent open-access book, Making Sense of Digital Humanities: Transformations and Interventions in Technocultures, offers a thematic roadmap to teaching digital humanities. His comic history exhibitions include Take Off! Comic Artists from the Great White North (2019),  Comics and the City (2020), and Justice for All: Social Justice in Comics (2022).

An interdisciplinary scholar, he continually seeks ways to bridge teaching, scholarship, and service to understand space, place, and identity better. His work embraces Black digital humanities and Critical Afrofuturist frameworks.  His co-edited primary document reader, Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (2018), highlights the differing ideology informing our understanding of black space. He has worked on several exhibitions examining Afrofuturism and visual culture, including Transfiguration: A Black Speculative Vision of Freedom at Philip and Patricia Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy of the Black Speculative Imagination, and Black Kirby: An Afrofuturist Vision both at the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts. He was featured on the Terrestrial Space Panel at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Claiming Space Symposium in 2022.

Chambliss co-produced and hosted Every Tongue Got to Confess, a podcast examining communities of color from 2017 to 2022.  Every Tongue won the 2019 Hampton Dunn New Media Award from the Florida Historical Society. In addition, he co-produced and co-hosted the Florida Constitution Podcast, a limited series podcast that won the 2019 Hampton Dunn Internet Award from the Florida Historical Society. He produces and hosts Reframing History, a podcast exploring humanities theory and practice in the United States. The second season of Reframing History inspired the publication of  Reframing Digital Humanities: Conversations with Digital Humanists (2021), collecting conversations from leading DH scholars. Chambliss co-hosts and produces The Graphic Possibilities Podcast exploring comics making and pedagogy.