Join comics scholars and other guest speakers for a conversation exploring how Jewish artists like Jack Kirby helped shape the American imagination through the birth of the modern superhero.

Dan Nadel is the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Whitney Museum of American Art. His previous books include, It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980; Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence, 1945–1976; and Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries, 1900–1969. Nadel has curated exhibitions for galleries and museums internationally. He is the founder of PictureBox, a publishing and packaging company that produced over one hundred books, objects, and zines from 2000 to 2014, including the Grammy Award–winning design for Wilco’s 2004 album A Ghost Is Born. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family.

Charles Hatfield is a Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, where he has taught for twenty-one years and counting. He is the author of Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby (2012), Alternative Comics (2005), and numerous essays and reviews; coeditor of Comics Studies: A Guidebook (2020) and The Superhero Reader (2013); and curator of Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby (CSUN Art Galleries, 2015), one of the largest exhibitions ever of Kirby’s original art. Hatfield has served as a cofounder and the first president (2014-2018) of the Comics Studies Society, and on the executive boards of the MLA Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum (2010-2014) and the International Comic Arts Forum (1997-2009). In 2005, he founded CSU Northridge’s popular course, Comics and Graphic Novels, an introduction to comics studies, which he has taught every year since. In addition, he has taught comics in myriad other courses and situations, in and out of school. In 2014, Hatfield won CSUN’s Preeminent Scholarly Publications Award, and in 2018 the Comics Studies Society established the annual Charles Hatfield Book Prize.

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