Comics: A Companion

Madeline Gangnes

Madeline’s co-edited (with Aidan Diamond and Lauranne Poharec) collection, Comics: A Companion (Peter Lang, 2026) will be published within the next few weeks. The book engages with the myriad meanings of “comics” through a wide range of texts and approaches, offering educators, students, and more a view of comics’ many nuances and complexities. The collection presents comics as physical objects: it incorporates dozens of physical and digital comics texts from around the globe. It presents comics as an artistic medium: it engages with a wide range of artistic styles, formats, materials, and production methods. It presents comics as a cultural phenomenon: it describes the many ways in which comics have shaped, and have been shaped by, their historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. Through examinations of genre, context, form, and transmediality, the volume provides both a broad overview of “comics” as a concept and a collection of close readings of individual texts, many of which have been overlooked or underdiscussed in existing scholarship.

Madeline at RSVP 2026

Madeline Gangnes

2026 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference

July 23-25, 2026
Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland)

Madeline will present her paper, “Short-Form Depictions of ‘Foreign’ Lands and Cultures Young Folks,” at the 2026 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) Conference. This paper examines a selection of short-form works—both text and image—from the children’s weekly story paper Our Young Folks Weekly Budget (1871-1897) that present locations, cultures, and animals from countries and territories outside of the British Isles. In Young Folks and similar periodicals, we see the Victorian interest in distant peoples and locales that pervades family miscellanies framed and presented in a manner to educate and entertain children. Central discussions include: In what manner does Young Folks present “foreign” places and peoples? What kinds of information does the paper presume young readers might already know? In what ways are the movements (or stasis) of Victorian authors and illustrators reflected in stories written for 1870s-1880s child audiences?

Madeline will also serve the Society at the conference in her new role as Recording Secretary of the RSVP Board of Directors.

Summer 2025 Conference Presentations

Madeline Gangnes

2025 Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) Conference

July 7-11, 2025
University of Rochester (Rochester, NY)

Madeline will present her paper, “Family Values and Value for Money: Young Folks as Wholesome Children’s Penny Paper,” at the 2025 Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) Conference. This paper explores some of the financial considerations of marketing and maintaining the Victorian children’s weekly penny paper Our Young Folks Weekly Budget (1871-1897), with particular focus on how the paper’s editors consciously established a community of readers through a weekly column. The editorial addresses in the column demonstrate the publisher’s clear focus on value for money, with moral instruction as a selling point. These materials illuminate how Young Folks established itself as a successful children’s penny weekly during a period when children’s buying power and tastes were in flux and the role of the Editor as a figure was evolving in response.

2025 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference

July 10-12, 2025
Loyola University Chicago (Chicago, IL)

Madeline will present her paper, “Editorial Vision and Marketing in Young Folks,” at the 2025 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) Conference. This paper explores the financial considerations of marketing Our Young Folks Weekly Budget (1871-1897) as a penny paper of high quality. Through an examination of interactions between “the Editor” and readers of Young Folks, it shows a consistent preoccupation with value for money throughout significant changes in format and content over time. The paper also demonstrates how Young Folks provides a useful model for the ways in which closely examining editor-reader interactions in one paper can lead to a greater understanding of how children’s periodicals navigate unstable and unpredictable markets.

The Literary Encyclopedia: Kidnapped

Madeline Gangnes

Madeline wrote the entry on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped for The Literary Encyclopedia, expanding their information on Stevenson’s life and works. The entry seeks to succinctly provide students and casual readers with an overview of the novel’s publication, plot, style, key narrative and thematic features, and historical and cultural context. First published in September 2000, The Literary Encyclopedia hosts over 10,000 articles about world literatures in English. It publishes biographies of major and minor writers, scholarly descriptions of all interesting texts written by these authors, and a variety of descriptive and critical essays on literary, cultural, and historical matters which provide a finer understanding of the social contexts in which this writing was produced.

Digital, Archival, and Collaborative Approaches

Madeline Gangnes

“Digital, Archival, and Collaborative Approaches in the Undergraduate Victorian Studies Classroom” appears in the Fall 2024 issue of the Victorian Periodicals Review. In this article for a special issue on Victorian studies pedagogy, Madeline describes the development of an upper-division undergraduate course wherein students engage with periodical texts through digital materials, tools, and methods that are used in individual and collaborative projects. Rather than offering a literature survey framed by key contexts, this course requires students to engage with fiction and nonfiction texts in digital facsimile, actively excavating such contexts. The article demonstrates how the digital can be incorporated into different kinds of Victorian studies classrooms at different kinds of institutions, and it models how digital Victorian studies courses can be made attractive and successful at smaller, teaching-focused institutions.

Summer 2024 Conference Presentations

Madeline Gangnes

2024 SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing) Conference

July 1-5, 2024
University of Reading and Online

Madeline will present her paper, “Access and Accessibility in Digital (De)collections,” at the 2024 Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) Conference, a hybrid conference in which she will be participating remotely. This paper explores ways in which periodical texts—particularly serials—can be made more approachable, legible, and accessible through digital projects that place texts within historical and aesthetic contexts with an eye toward universal design. Madeline will use her project, The (De)collected War of the Worlds (decollected.net), to show how one might reconfigure and recontextualize a periodical text to highlight meanings that can become obscured through republication as volumes.

Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference

July 15-17, 2024
Canterbury Christ Church University and Online

Madeline will present her paper, “Corrupted Spaces and Places in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as Illustrated by Matt Kish,” at the 2024 Victorian Popular Fiction Association Conference, a hybrid conference in which she will be participating remotely. This paper reads Heart of Darkness as descended from, and indebted to, the kind of masculine adventure fiction and imperial romance seen in the Victorian popular press. With a focus on setting and characters’ psychological responses to physical environments, Madeline examines Kish’s depictions of people and places both within and outside of the Congo, and illuminates Kish’s visual-critical suggestion that one cannot return from an imperial space to a European space without bringing the corrupting influence of empire home.

Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals

Madeline Gangnes

Madeline’s essay, “Scottish Stereotyping, Highlandism, and Stevenson in Young Folks Paper” appears in The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Her chapter examines how depictions of Scotland and Scots in this children’s story paper reflect broader late-Victorian attitudes and might have shaped young readers’ perceptions of complex historical and cultural contexts related to Scotland and its inhabitants. The collection as a whole marks the first major history of magazines for young people from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Bringing together periodicals from Britain, Ireland, North America, Australia, New Zealand and India, this book explores the roles of gender, race and national identity in the construction of children as readers and writers. It provides new insights both into how child readers shaped the magazines they read and how magazines have encouraged children to view themselves as political and world subjects.

Multimodal Comics

Madeline Gangnes

Madeline’s co-edited (with Drs. Chris Murray and Julia Round) collection, Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies (Intellect, 2024) has just been published in the United Kingdom and is being distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The collection showcases a selection of essays from ten years of Studies in Comics (journal) archives alongside several new pieces on the subject of multimodality in comics. It explores interactions between comics and other media and technologies, employing a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives. By focusing on key critical concepts within multimodality (transmediality, adaptation, intertextuality) and addressing multiple platforms and media (digital, analog, music, prose, linguistics, graphics), this collection expands and develops existing comics theory and addresses multiple other media and disciplines. This volume demonstrates the evolution of comics studies over the last decade and shows how this research field has engaged with various media and technologies in a continuously evolving, multimodal artistic and production environment.

Madeline at NeMLA 2024 (Two Panels)

Madeline Gangnes

2024 NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) Convention

March 7-10, 2024
Sheraton Boston, MA

Madeline presented two papers at the 2024 Northeast Modern Language Association Convention. The first, “Multimodal Approaches in the Undergraduate Victorian Studies Classroom,” describes the development of an upper-division undergraduate course (“Digital Victorians”) that models ways in which humanities courses can incorporate digital materials, tools, and methods into individual and collaborative projects. It was part of the panel, “An Excess of Expression: Multimodal Pedagogy in the Humanities.”

Her second presentation, “Geologic Time, Climate Anxiety, and Hope in Environmental Literature Classrooms,” was part of the “Geologic Time: An Eternal Excess” roundtable. This paper explores the concept of solastalgia: a term coined by Glenn Albrecht to describe a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’ when that place has been changed, especially by climate disruption. Madeline described her students’ climate anxiety and shared example texts from her courses that evoke and provoke solastalgia.

Summer 2023 Conference Presentations

Madeline Gangnes

2023 SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing) Conference

June 26-30, 2023
Online

Madeline will present her paper, “Digital, Archival, and/or Collaborative Approaches in the Victorian Studies Classroom,” at the 2023 Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) Conference, which will be held online. This paper describes the development of an upper-division undergraduate course (“Digital Victorians”) that models ways in which literature courses can move beyond reading texts in facsimile to incorporating digital materials, tools, and methods into individual and collaborative projects. In learning-through-doing how Victorians read, students contribute to a greater understanding and articulation of the course subject than would be possible through more “traditional” engagements with Victorian literature.

2023 ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
+ AESS (Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences) Conference

July 9-12, 2023
Portland, Oregon

Madeline will present her paper, “Teaching Literature of the Environment at a Jesuit Institution,” at the 2023 joint conference of the ASLE and AESS, which will be held at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. This paper describes the development of three complementary courses on literature of the environment at the University of Scranton that contribute to its Environmental and Sustainability Studies concentration. Guided by the Society of Jesus’ Universal Apostolic Preferences and other principles of Catholic environmentalism, and through a combination of literary studies and community-based learning, these new courses demonstrate the power of literature to further environmental justice.