Graphic novelist, college educator, and comics studies scholar, A. David Lewis holds a Ph.D. in Religion & Literature from Boston University based on a study of the superhero afterlife and the hermeneutics of selfhood, and an M.A. in English Literature from Georgetown University. He started lecturing on comics as well as writing short back-up stories for various anthologies back in 1999 as he graduated from Brandeis University with a B.A. in both English and Psychology. Critically praised for his creative work in independent comics, Lewis has been featured in The Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Bostonia and on WAMU's Interfaith Voices, VH-1, and Boston's NPR affiliate WBUR. His academic works include the recent American Comics, Literary Theory and Religion: The Superhero Afterlife (2014), and his co-edited volume Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels (2010, with Christine Hoff Kraemer). See his website for more details, publications, etc.
A. Dave Lewis joins us again for a discussion of representations of Muslims in superhero comics. We talk about some positive representations, like Kamala Khan, Marvel's new Ms Marvel, and some less-than-positive portrayals, like Frank Millar's Holy Terror!
Go back to 2013 to discuss Religion & Pop Culture (and #DoctorWho) with James F. McGrath! It's a big universe, and sometimes things get lost in time and space.
Many of us only know about the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan through film and television, and much of what we see blurs fact and fiction. Distinguishing each side of that messy divide is the prolific Kelly J. Baker, exploring how media portrayals of the hate group have influenced audiences and, in turn, fed back on its own members.
"There's always the risk in popular culture studies - first of all, it's so fluid, you know, things change so fast - that the minute you've said something, it's obsolete. And there's always the risk that the material can't bear the weight of analysis," said Kate McCarthy in 2013, shortly after the re-release of her co-edited volume God in the Details. However, ...
In this wide-ranging interview with A. David Lewis, comic books are presented as an irreplaceable cultural medium for engaging with issues of mortality, identity, subjectivity, and cosmology. With an overwhelming slate of comic book driven television series (Walking Dead, Gotham, ...
What better way to end our series on Religion and Cultural Production than with a podcast combining two of my favourite topics - religion and comic books (and we will have none of your middle-class renaming "graphic novels" round RSP HQ)! Today, RSP assistant editor Per Smith talks to A. David Lewis and attempts to delineate an emergent and very rich sub-discipline.
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