JULIAN C. CHAMBLISS

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 a co-director for the Department of English Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (DHLC). His research focuses 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 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 Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics (2023), 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-themed 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. His work embraces Black digital humanities and Critical Afrofuturist frameworks. His recent exhibition, Techno: The Rise of Detroit’s Machine Music, examines the origins and evolution of techno music in Detroit through an Afrofuturist lens.  His reader on Afrofuturism, Mapping Afrofuturism: Understanding Black Speculative Practice (2024), offers students a comprehensive exploration of Afrofuturism theory and practice. His co-edited primary document reader, Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (2018), highlights the differing ideologies informing our understanding of black space. He co-produced and directed Afrofantastic: The Transformative World of Afrofuturism, a documentary exploring Afrofuturism for WKAR PBS.  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.