This Is Not A Pipe

Brian Jefferson discusses his book Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age with Chris Richardson. Jefferson is Associate Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. He edits the digital magazine societyandspace.org, serves on the editorial boards of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Urban Geography, and is author of Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age.

Kevin M Gannon discusses his book Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto with Chris Richardson. Gannon is Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and Professor of History, at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He is the author of Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, and writes regularly for the Chronicle of Higher Education and on his blog, The Tattooed Professor. In 2016, he appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary 13th. Find him on Twitter: @TheTattooedProf

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas discusses her book The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games with Chris Richardson. Thomas is Associate Professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Educational Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. A former Detroit Public Schools teacher and National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she was a member of the NCTE Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color’s 2008-2010 cohort, served on the NCTE Conference on English Education's Executive Committee from 2013 until 2017, and is the immediate past chair of the NCTE Standing Committee on Research. Currently, she serves as co-editor of Research of the Teaching of English, and her most recent book is The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019). She is an advisory board member and consultant on Teaching Tolerance’s Teaching Hard History project.

Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt discuss their book Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter with Chris Richardson. Luke Fernandez is Asst. Prof. in the School of Computing at Weber State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Theory from Cornell University. He also is a software developer. His writing has appeared in a range of publications, including the Washington Post, Slate, Lapham's Quarterly, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.Susan J. Matt is an historian of the emotions and Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University. She is author of Homesickness: An American History (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Journal of American History, among other places.

Marc Singer discusses his book Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies with Chris Richardson. Singer is Associate Professor of English at Howard University in Washington DC, where he studies twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature, with interests in contemporary fiction, comics, and film. He is the author of Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies (Univ. of Texas Press, 2018) and Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2012) and the editor, with Nels Pearson, of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (Ashgate, 2009).

Catherine A Sanderson discusses her book Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels with Chris Richardson. Sanderson is the Manwell Family Professor of Life Sciences (Psychology at Amherst College. She received a bachelor's degree in psychology, with a specialization in Health and Development, from Stanford University, and received both masters and doctoral degrees in psychology from Princeton University. Her research has received grant funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health. Professor Sanderson has published over 25 journal articles and book chapters in addition to four college textbooks, middle school and high school health textbooks, and trade books on parenting as well as how mindset influences happiness, health, and even how long we live (The Positive Shift). In 2012, she was named one of the country's top 300 professors by the Princeton Review.

Arthur I. Miller discusses his book The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity with Chris Richardson. Miller is fascinated by the nature of creative thinking. He has published many critically acclaimed books, including Insights of Genius; Einstein, Picasso (shortlisted for a Pulitzer); Empire of the Stars (shortlisted for the Aventis Prize); and 137. He writes for the Guardian, The New York Times, Wired magazine and Salon. He is professor emeritus of history and philosophy of science at University College London. An experienced broadcaster and lecturer, Miller has judged art competitions and curated exhibitions on art/science. His previous book, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art, tells how art, science and technology are fusing in the twenty-first century. The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity spins off the hundred-odd interviews Miller did with scientists on the cutting-edge of AI-created art, literature and music. It is the culmination of over three decades of work on creativity in humans and creativity in machines and is a tour of creativity in the age of machines. Far from being a dystopian account, it celebrates the creative possibilities of AI in the arts.

Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner discuss their book The Supervillain Reader with Chris Richardson. Peaslee is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Journalism & Creative Media Industries. He holds a PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and his publications have focused on media-related tourism and festivals, superheroes and contemporary popular culture, documentary and feature film, and international communication. He is the co-editor of four volumes on various dimensions of comics, film, and television, and his work has appeared in journals such as Adaptation, Transformative Works & Cultures, Visual Communication Quarterly, Mass Communication and Society, and the International Journal of Communication. Originally from Milford, NH, he now calls Lubbock, TX home, and lives happily with his wife Kate and their three superhero kids, Coen, Hazel, and Nora.Robert G. “Rob” Weiner is Popular Culture Librarian and liaison to the College of Visual and Performing Arts. He also teaches for the Honors College. His research interests include sequential art, popular music, and the history of film. He has authored/edited/co-edited over 15 books including Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries, The Supervillain Reader (with Robert Moses Peaslee), Marvel Graphic Novels, In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater 3000 (with Shelley Barba) Python Beyond Python: Critical Engagements with Culture (with Paul Reinsch and Lynn Whitfield), Perspectives on the Grateful Dead, Graphic Novels and Comics in the Classroom (with Carry Syma), Marvel Comics into Film (with Matt McEniry and Robert Moses Peaslee) and The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime (with Robert Moses Peaslee). Rob has also published articles and book chapters in The International Journal of Comic Art, ImageText, Journal of Pan African Studies, Texas Library Journal, Secret Origins of Comic Studies, The Routledge Companion to Comics, The Vietnam War in Popular Culture, What's Eating You: Food and Horror on the Screen, and Global Glam and Popular Music, Race in American Film: Voices and Visions that Shaped a Nation. Most recently he published several pieces in The American Superhero.

Lochlann Jain discusses Things That Art: A Graphic Menagerie of Enchanting Curiosity with Chris Richardson. Jain is an award-winning scholar and artist. Jain’s work in the medical anthropology and the history of medicine and law has investigated how scientific research questions are framed and what factors are excluded. Jain is the author of three books. Most recently, a book of drawings, Things that Art (University of Toronto Press, 2019), reconsiders and interrupts the ways in which categories underpin knowledge systems and also aims to realize drawing as a useful and provocative method in the social sciences. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (UC Press: 2013) examines the ways in which institutions such as law, medicine, and the media have established ways of understanding, justifying, and carefully managing the social understanding of cancer. Injury (Princeton UP: 2006), analyzed the twentieth century emergence of tort law in the United States as a highly politicized and problematic form of regulating the design of mass-produced commodities in light of their propensity to injure naïve consumers. The book analyzes the history of the way in which product design has encoded assumptions and biases that have impacted how injuries are distributed and subsequently understood in law. Jain is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and a Visiting Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’ College London.

Liam Burke discusses his co-edited book The Superhero Symbol: Media, Culture & Politics with Chris Richardson. Associate Professor Liam Burke is the discipline leader in Cinema and Screen Studies at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. Liam has published widely on comic books and adaptation, with his books including The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre, Superhero Movies, and the edited collection Fan Phenomena Batman. His most recent book, the edited collection The Superhero Symbol (with Ian Gordon and Angela Ndalianis), was published by Rutgers University Press in 2019. Liam is a chief investigator of the Australian Research Council funded project Superheroes & Me.