Michael A. Chaney
Professor
Appointments
Edward Hyde Cox Professor of English and American Literature
Area of Expertise
American Literature (19th-Century),
African American Literature ,
Visual Media Studies
Biography
Michael Chaney specializes in nineteenth-century American and African American literature, race representation, visual culture studies, and autobiography. He is the author of two monographs, Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative and Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel. Chaney's latest edited collection, Where Is All My Relation? The Poetics of 'Dave' the Potter (Oxford UP), explores the multifaceted artwork of David Drake, an enslaved ceramicist and poet who worked in antebellum South Carolina. Chaney's academic essays on visuality and race have been published in American Literature, African American Review, Callaloo, SubStance, and MELUS. Inspired by his own "mixed-race" Black and White identity, he is currently working on a book-length study of U.S. interracial identities and the changing political functions of autobiography. Chaney's teaching spans such courses as Early Black American Literature and Graphic Medicine.
Education
Ph.D. Indiana University
Publications
(Ed.) Where is All My Relation: The Poetics of Dave the Potter (2018).
"'I Knew Then Who I Was. I Was a Negro': Black Armed Defense in Walter White's A Man Called White." MELUS 49.1 (2024): 122-143.
"On U.S. Presidential Effigy." American Studies 63.1 (2024): 7-31.
"Depicting African American Life in Graphics and Visual Cultures." In A History of African American Autobiography, ed., Joycelyn Moody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021: 327-343.
"Words, Wares, Names: Dave the Potter as American Archive." Anglia. Journal of English Philology / Zeitschrift für englische Philologie 138.3 (2020): 1-20.
"Anarchic Strains in the Comics of Ronald Wimberly and Keith Knight." SubStance: Special Issue on Comics and Anarchy 46.2 (2017): 110-128.
"Signifying Marks and The 'Not Counted' Inscriptions of Dave the Potter." Arizona Quarterly 72.4 (Winter 2016): 1-25.
"Digression, Slavery, and Failing to Return in The Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke." Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39.4 (Fall 2016): 511-534.
"The Cartoonal Slave." In The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Culture, eds. Soyica Colbert, Robert Patterson, and Aida Hussen. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016. 168-94.
"Slave Memory Without Words in Kyle Baker's Nat Turner." Callaloo 36.2 (2013): 279-297.
"The Concatenate Poetics of Slavery and the Articulate Material of Dave the Potter." African American Review 44.4 (2011): 607-18.
"Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel." College Literature 38.3 (2011): 129-149.
"Terrors of the Mirror and the Mise en Abyme of Graphic Novel Autobiography," College Literature 38:3 (2011) 21-44.
"'Heartfelt Thanks to Punch for the Picture': Frederick Douglass and the Transnational Jokework of Slave Caricature," American Literature 82:1 (2010) 57-90.
"Drawing on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels," MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 32:3 (2007) 175-200.
"Slave Cyborgs and the Black Infovirus: Ishmael Reed's Cybernetic Aesthetics," Modern Fiction Studies 49:2 (2003) 261-283.
"Picturing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom as Auto(bio)ethnography." African American Review 35.3 (2001): 391-408.
Speaking Engagements
Inaugural Webinar 'Tributo' Address: "The Literary and Interpretive Horizons of Graphic Narrative" St. Joseph's College, India. September 15, 2020.
Keynote Address: "Reading March Covers with and Against the President." Spaced Out Comics Conference at Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy. October 26, 2017.
Keynote Address: "The Covers of John Lewis's March Trilogy and the Paracaption." University of Siegen. Germany. Summer School, "Transnational Graphic Narratives." July 31-August 5 2017.
Keynote Address: "Where? Reflections on Richard McGuire's Here and the Spatial Ontology of Comics." International Comic Arts Forum. Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia SC. April 14, 2016.
Address, "Counting on Theory to Account for Dave the Potter's 'Not Counted' Jar." McKissick Museum, Columbia SC. April 12, 2016.
Plenary Speaker, "Graphic Novels Offer Reading Lessons in Seeing." McComb Conference. Miami University, Oxford OH. March 12, 2016.
Plenary Speaker and Seminar Discussant, "History as Autobiography in Contemporary African American Comics and Graphic Narrative." Hermanns Lecture Series. University of Texas, Arlington. October 23, 2015.
Plenary Speaker, "Race, the Human, and History in the Graphic Novel." Honors College of Emerson College. Boston, MA. September 28, 2015.
Plenary Speaker, "What Can Krazy Kat Tell Us About Seriality and Comics Poetics?" Mass Media and Seriality in 1920s-1930s US Popular Visual Culture. Hannover, Germany. April 24, 2015.
Keynote Address: "Picture Games in Story Frames: The Play Spaces of Graphic Novels." Graduate Student Conference at the University of Montreal, Canada. March 16, 2012.
Plenary Speaker, "Flipped Scripts and Magnifying Glasses: Barthes' Image Music Text and the Comics" Panel." Interdisciplinary Methodology Conference: The Case of Comics Studies. University of Bern, Switzerland. 15 October 2011.
"Seeing the Social, Or How to Read a Graphic Novel." TEdX Conference at Dartmouth College, March 6, 2011.
Plenary Speaker, "Pictorial Aurality in Kyle Baker's Nat Turner." Life Writing and the Graphic Novel: an International Conference. Ruhr University of Paderborn, Germany. July 2, 2010.
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