• Jonathan W. Gray
• Associate Professor of English
• CUNY Graduate Center

Jonathan W. Gray, Associate Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and at John Jay College, works on post-WWII American culture, African American literary production, popular culture with an emphasis on comic books and graphic novels, and visual culture. His first book, Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination (Mississippi) traces the white literary responses to the period between the Brown case and the death of Martin Luther King. His forthcoming monograph, Illustrating the Race (Columbia), investigates how the twin understandings of illustration—the creative act of depiction and the political act of bringing forth for public consideration—function in the representation of African Americans in comics and graphic narratives published since 1966. Prof. Gray contributed the entry “Race” to Keywords for Comic Studies (NYU), co-edited the essay collection Disability in Comics and Graphic Novels (Palgrave McMillian), and served as founding editor of the Journal of Comics and Culture (Pace). His writing on various aspects of popular culture has appeared in Film Quarterly, The New Republic, Salon and Entertainment Weekly.

Speaking In:

• Black Spatial Futures