UIC students to present research at C2E2 comics expo

Next week, from April 26-28, the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo, or C2E2, will fill McCormick Place in Chicago with pop-culture fans, comic book artists, voice actors, celebrities and authors. It’s one of the largest comic book and pop culture conventions in the country, and this year, five undergraduate students from University of Illinois Chicago will present their comics research there.

Their panel, called Dispatches from UIC Comic Studies, will feature papers from students Mathew Rusky, Makayla Ernst, Dzenita Mustafi, Rosh Seleena Gonzalez and Luc Guerrero. The papers expand on work the students did in fall 2023 as part of their coursework for English 237: Graphic Novels, which covers the development of this form of media.

The idea for the panel presentation sprang from students’ interest in having more time to talk about the books they were reading in class and produce public scholarship, said Keegan Lannon, who teaches the course in the English department.

“I couldn’t be more pleased with this multidisciplinary collection of research being presented on Friday,” Keegan said. “As part of English 237, each of these students were required to write a paper analyzing one of the books from class. But when it came time to write the proposal for C2E2, none of the researchers opted to use their papers from class, and instead voluntarily wrote new papers. None of this is for class credit. These are passion projects, stemming directly from their engagement with the text and written purely for the joy of academic discourse.”

The topics they’ll cover range from how death informs the way we make narration out of life to the best practices for raising children with mental health disorders to the redemptive nature of familial love, Keegan said.

The students will present their work at 11:15 a.m. Friday, April 26, in Room S405-A at the convention, which will be held at McCormick Place, 2301 S. Martin Luther King Drive. The convention runs from Friday, April 26, to Sunday, April 28.