Graphic Narratives Lab Student Showcase
The HRC’s Graphic Narratives Lab is a place where faculty and students meet to study “the importance of graphic narratives within the humanities and consider why and how faculty can implement graphic narratives into their pedagogy.”
Graphic narratives—ranging from cave paintings to woodcuts to comic books—are integral to how individuals and societies express and share views of their places in this world. Sequential graphic narratives, e.g. comic books, may be dominated by superheroes in American popular culture, but have long explored a much richer vein of the human experience, exploring themes of race, racism, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, misogyny, patriarchy, class, inequality, environmental racism, the climate crisis, and much more. Graphic narratives broaden the reach of the humanities to audiences in an accessible fashion and are research subjects in their own right.
VCU is uniquely positioned to examine graphic narratives within the humanities, with faculty and students from African American Studies, Anthropology, Business, English, and the School of the Arts actively creating comic books that push the boundaries of storytelling.
The Cabell Screen features work by this year’s fellows. A student showcase will be held on Monday, April 28, 2025, at Cabell Library to honor this year’s fellows.
The lab is co-directed by: Bernard K. Means, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology in the School of World Studies; Grace D. Gipson, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies; and Francesca Lyn, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies.
Categories Student Work, Students