Charlotte Schallié (PhD) is a Professor of Germanic Studies and Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria. Her teaching and research interests include memory studies, visual culture studies & graphic narratives, teaching and learning about the Holocaust, genocide and human rights education, community-engaged participatory research, and arts-based action research.

Andrea Webb (PhD) spent a decade as a classroom teacher and department head before returning to higher education as a teacher educator at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests lie in teaching and learning in higher education and she is involved in research projects related to Threshold Concepts, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and Social Studies Teacher Education.

Jennifer Sauter is the Project Manger on the SSHRC Partnership Grant, overseeing the finances, Research Cluster logistics, partnership contracts, event coordination, social media and student engagement. She is currently based at the University of Victoria. Although she has a Master’s degree in Environmental Studies, she is drawn to project based work with a focus on environmental, social, or visual arts research.

Matt Huculak (PhD) is Head, Advanced Research Services & Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of Victoria Libraries. He holds a PhD in English Language & Literature and an MLIS with a concentration on archives and preservation. He was technical director and founding Managing Editor of Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform, which won the Association of American Publishers 2019 PROSE Awards for “Innovation in Publishing.” His current work focuses on Human Rights and archiving.

Raey Costain is a PhD student in the anthropology department at the University of Victoria. Their work engages graphic anthropology, comics-led research, digital media, and graphic design.

Drawing by Raey Costain.

Tobi Dahmen, born 1971 in Frankfurt/Main, is a German illustrator and comic artist living in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He is working for various clients and has published a few comic books. He is currently working on a graphic novel about the story of his family in WWII.

Natasha Donovan is an illustrator who works primarily on children’s books and graphic novels. She illustrated the graphic novel adaptation of Thomas King’s short story, Borders, which received a Horn Book award honor and was shortlisted for the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award. She is also the illustrator of Brett Huson’s award-winning Mothers of Xsan series and Traci Sorell’s Classified: The Secret Career of Mary Golda Ross, Cherokee Aerospace Engineer, among other titles. Natasha is Métis (her Métis family are the Delarondes and Morins on her mother’s side) and white settler (on her father’s side). She grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and currently lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her partner and their dog.

Joëlle Ebene (Elyon’s) is a graphic designer, comic book author, and curator. She has co-curated various comics exhibition including the South African virtual exhibition, “Afropolitan Comics.” Her publications include the comic series “La vie d’Ebène Duta.”

Anneli Furmark is a painter and comic artist from North Sweden, who has published ten graphic novels, many of them translated and award winning. Her latest book “Walk me to the Corner” was published at Drawn&Quarterly, Montreal, in 2021.

Photo credit Anna Drvnik.

Michel Kichka is a graphic novelist and political cartoonist. He was born in Belgium in 1954 in a family of Holocaust survivors and emigrated to Israel in 1974. He graduated the Graphic Design Department at Bezalel Academy of Jerusalem in 1978 where he teaches since 1984. He is a member of Cartooning for Peace Association since 2006. Kichka has published three graphic novels at Dargaud Publishers in Paris that were translated to several languages. “Second Generation- Things I did not tell my father” (2012), “Falafel with hot sauce” (2018), “The other Jerusalem” (2023). All of them are autobiographic.

Photo credit Elie Max Kichka.

Nora Krug is the author of “Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home,” a visual memoir about WWII and her German family history, and of “Diaries of War: Two Visual Accounts from Ukraine and Russia,” a book of graphic journalism about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She is also the illustrator of the graphic edition of “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder.

Miriam Libicki is an Inkpot and Vine award winning creator of nonfiction graphic novels and graphic essays, including “jobnik!” “Toward A Hot Jew,” “But I Live,” and “Who Gets Called an Unfit Mother.” Miriam lives in Vancouver, Canada and teaches Humanities and Illustration at Emily Carr University.

Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley is an Anishinaabe Illustrator/artist from Barrie, ON and a member of Wasauksing First Nation.

Photo credit Meg Wallace.

Jared Muralt, born in Bern in 1982, is a Swiss illustrator and comic artist. Jared Muralt’s comic series “The Fall” was awarded the Atomium Award “Le Soir de la BD d’actualité” for current contemporary comics in 2020, and Muralt himself received the Bernese Literature Prize in 2021.

Gilad Seliktar is a graphic novelist, illustrator and illustration lecturer. Seliktar wrote and illustrated “Tsav 8” (2014), “The Demons of Mongols” (2008) and “Who Are You Anyway” (2005). The book “Farm 54” (2009), written by his sister Galit Seliktar, was part of the Angoulême Festival’s official selection and was included in Publisher Weekly’s top ten graphic novels in 2011. In 2018, Seliktar received an honourable mention in the Israel Museum Ben-Yitzhak Award competition for the category of Illustration of a Children’s Book.

Birgit Weyhe is a comic book artist. She was born in 1969 in Munich and achieved a Master’s Degree in German Literature and History, as well as a Diploma in illustration. Weyhe‘s Graphic Novels have been nominated for various prizes in Germany, France and Japan. Her books focus on research-based historical and political themes. In 2022 she was honoured the ‘Best German-language Comics Artist’ at the International Comic-Salon in Erlangen. And she was the first comic artist ever to receive the prestigious ‘Hamburg Lessing Grant’. Her latest Graphic Novel “Rude Girl” was shortlisted in 2022 for the Hamburg Literature Prize as Book of the Year and in 2023 the first comic ever to be nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. She lives and works in Hamburg.

Photo credit Vera Drebusch.

Barbara Yelin is a graphic novelist and illustrator. She was born in 1977 in Munich and studied illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Yelin has worked as a comics artist for newspapers and international anthologies, but her work largely focuses on research-based, historical, and biographical graphic novels, mainly about women. In 2014, Yelin published the award-winning graphic novel “Irmina.” In 2016, she was declared the ‘Best German-language Comics Artist’ at the International Comic-Salon in Erlangen. She lives and works in Munich.

Ajnura Akbaš works as an archivist and research coordinator at the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), where she is involved in the museum’s research-documentation projects dedicated to the experience of growing up during armed conflict. She is also a Doctoral candidate in Gender Studies at the London School of Economics (LSE).

Dr. Leyla Ferman is a political scientist based in Germany and focusing on human rights, genocides and the Middle East. She is currently leading FERMAN, a documentation and education project an the Yazidi genocide of Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation.

Marc Ellison is an award-winning video- and photojournalist currently based in Scotland. He has worked across the African continent producing documentaries and multimedia projects since 2011 on topics ranging from female child soldiers to female genital mutilation. Marc is also the co-author of the award-winning photo/graphic novel ‘House Without Windows’.

His work can be viewed at www.marcellison.com.

Chorong Kim is a Canadian Screen Award-nominated filmmaker and photographer. Born in Berlin, raised in Seoul, and now living across Canada, she experienced distinct cultural landscapes as a hybrid and transversal nomad.

Chen Wang was born in Mainland China and moved to Victoria in 2013 and worked on film and video productions since 2014. He is currently working on his PhD program focusing migration history and documentary films, teaching film courses at the University of Victoria.

As a director, cinematographer, and writer, Chen has worked on over 60 commercials, music videos, and documentary films, as well as on short and feature films screened at film festivals internationally.

Peter Wollring is a videographer based in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Kjell Anderson (PhD) is a social scientist and jurist whose interdisciplinary research examines mass atrocities and international crimes. He is the Director of the Master of Human Rights program at the University of Manitoba and an Assistant Professor of Law.

Jessica Botts is a US Navy Veteran who’s lived in and deployed to several countries. Currently she is a Graduate student pursuing a Master’s Degree in Enviornmental History at University of Nebraska at Omaha, with a minor focus in Native American Studies.

Mark Celinscak (PhD) is the Louis and Frances Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Executive Director of the Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Meghna is completing her Master’s degree in English at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on the intersection of formalist comics studies, critical race and gender studies, and migration studies. She looks closely at the expressions of decolonial timespaces in comics, specifically how bodies in borderlands dream, imagine, and speculate new futures.

Tim Cole (PhD) is Professor of Social History at the University of Bristol where he specialises in Holocaust Studies, environmental histories and digital humanities. He was the founding director of the Brigstow Institute that seeks to develop equitable research relationships between academics from different disciplines and community and creative partners. Tim is also Academic Advisor to the Dan David Prize, and since 2020 has been Chair of the History Commission set up by the Mayor of Bristol in the wake of the toppling of the Colston statue.

Keerti Gupta (she/her), a settler and UBC IMES Scholar in Vancouver is graduating with a Film Studies major and Creative Writing minor. Her contributions to the UBC Comics Studies Cluster include working on the Homalco Comics Project and the EUA Graphics Project, where she enhanced visibility and streamlined project coordination. Keerti is currently a Channel Manager at RHEI, aiming to blend her passion for performance and digital media with social impact.

Iain Higgins (PhD) is a member of the English Department and the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Victoria and the current Editor of The Malahat Review. He has worked extensively as a translator for the SCVN project in the Holocaust Research Cluster. Drawing by Raey Costain.

Cindy Holder (PhD) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on human rights (including the human rights of Indigenous peoples), international ethics, transitional justice and the philosophy of international law.

Erin Jessee (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Her primary research focuses on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, during which Hutu Power extremists attempted to exterminate the nation’s ethnic Tutsi minority. She also researches earlier periods of Rwandan history with the goal of drawing attention to women historical actors who have been largely overlooked in written accounts about Rwanda.

Lucie Kotesovska is a PhD candidate at the English Department of the University of Victoria. In her research and publication, she focuses mainly on British and Irish literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. She is equally passionate about teaching and professional collaboration within the field of SoTL. She is currently completing her dissertation in which she examines renegotiation of the boundaries between private and public worlds in Irish poetry from the 1960s until now.

Shannon Leddy (PhD) is a Métis writer and educator, originally from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Treaty Six territory. She has lived on Musqueam land in Vancouver since 1994, and works as an Associate Professor of Art Education at the University of British Columbia.

Fransiska Louwagie (PhD) works on survivor narratives and the representation of the Holocaust in contemporary Francophone fiction and bande dessinée. Her research also focuses on issues of migration, bilingualism and translation. Her work has involved various research collaborations in the field of drama and the visual arts, particularly graphic novels, post-Holocaust art and political cartooning.

Andrea Löw (PhD) is Deputy Director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. She also teaches at the University of Mannheim.

Duncan McCue is a Professor of Indigenous Journalism and (Story)telling at Carleton University’s School of Journalism. He is the author of “Decolonizing Journalism: A Guide to Reporting in Indigenous Communities” and “The Shoe Boy,” a memoir of his time spent on a trapline with a Cree family in northern Quebec. Duncan is a proud Anishinaabe, from the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation in southern Ontario.

Stephen Naron (PhD) has worked as an archivist/librarian since 2003, and has worked at Yale University with the Fortunoff Archive for more than 12 years, starting as an archivist and now, as director. Stephen works within the wider research community to share access to the collection through the access site program. Stephen is also responsible for spearheading initiatives such as preservation and digital access to the collection; cooperative projects with other testimony collections; oversight of fellowship and research programs; and the production of the podcasts, ethnomusicological recordings, and the Archive’s documentary film series.

Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam (PhD) is an Assistant Professor and settler scholar in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at UBC in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She is currently completing her manuscript “Graphic Historiography: History & Memory through Comics and Graphic Novels.” Biz’s research and teaching includes history, migration, intersections between Indigenous and European studies, and feminist methodologies in relation to comics and graphic arts.

Aubrey Pomerance (PhD) is the Head of Archives at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Born in Calgary, Canada, he studied Jewish Studies and History at the Freie Universität Berlin. There he was a research assistant at the Institut für Judaistik in 1995 and 1996 and thereafter at the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institut for German Jewish history in Duisburg. In April 2001, he took up his position at the Jewish Museum Berlin, being responsible for the establishment of a branch of the Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute and for the museum’s archival collection.

Photo credit Jacobia Dahm.

Anton Rey is the head of the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film (PF) at Zurich University of the Arts where he is also a professor. His main fields of research focus on practice-based art beyond the ephemeral event, and their comparative perspectives, debates, and dissemination.

Jacqueline Rutherford is a Master’s student in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Victoria. Her current research, which is being conducted in French, aims to explore the language practices and linguistic representations of French-speaking immigrants in Greater Vancouver.

Kees Ribbens (PhD) is a historian working at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam with a keen interest in the ways in which wars and genocides are remembered and represented. Kees is an avid reader of graphic novels.

Sabine Rutar (PhD) is Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of Comparative Southeast European Studies and Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute of East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, Germany.

Uğur Ümit Üngör (PhD) is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute. His main areas of interest are genocide and mass violence, with a particular focus on the modern and contemporary Middle East.

Anna Wohlgemuth is a stage designer, and researcher focusing on visual storytelling in theater, film, visual media as Comics and exhibition spaces. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Arts Linz in collaboration with the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film at Zurich University of the Arts where she also works as a research assistant in the early career research program 3rd, with Dr. Ilse van Rijn as the head. For her practice-based research, she engages in dialogue with the research project Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives, the exploration of the representability of historical events in terms of their political aesthetics, ranging from documentary storytelling to fantastical visual worlds, between fact and fiction.

Photo credit Flavio Karrer

Janine Wulz is a PhD candidate and instructor at the University of Victoria. She is a Research Assistant on the project and works with survivor interviews.

Franziska Zaugg (PhD) has been a Lecturer at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Fribourg since February 2022 and an Associate Researcher at the University of Bern. Her research interests include conflict and war, resistance and collaboration, commemoration and reconciliation, youth cultures, and the relationship between archives and society. She is co-founder of the working group “History-Society-Violence” (Geschichte-Gesellschaft-Gewalt).

Véronique Sina (PhD) is a film and media studies scholar at Goethe University Frankfurt. She is the Principal Investigator of the DFG funded project “Queering Jewishness – Jewish Queerness. Discursive Constructions of Gender and ‘Jewish Difference’ in (Audio-)Visual Media” and specialises in Gender/Queer Studies, Intersectionality, Intermediality, Comics Studies, Media Aesthetics, Holocaust Studies and Jewish Visual Culture Studies.