Overview
Lisa is a scholar of Old and Middle English literature and culture, Comic book and graphic novel studies, and Black Feminist literature and theory. Her work focuses on the roles of empathy and social regulations of feeling in identity-based categorization and oppression in the West. Lisa’s dissertation project, “After You’re Done Crying”: Regulating Feelings, Gender, and Race in Medieval Literature and Contemporary Comics, tentatively argues that narrative storytelling across time and medium construct, communicate, and repeat social cues for proper modes of feeling which influence how we organize what Sylvia Wynter calls “genres of the human.” Lisa’s work fits into broader discussions of oppressive violence in the West as well as diversity in media representation, emphasizing that we cannot overlook the depth to which storytelling informs ideas about who deserves empathy, which ultimately determines who deserves to live in Western society.
Lisa’s previous work has focused on medieval English affective piety, medieval and modern visual culture, and the crucified masculine body in medieval literature and superhero comics. Her Master’s thesis dealt with affective codes of masculinity in Middle English alliterative chivalric poetry and the Batman mythos. Lisa is broadly interested in cultural “traces” in temporally distant media, and more specifically interested in what those traces reveal about cultural expectations for embodied and gendered experiences.
Lisa’s work has been published in the “Freaks and Othered Bodies” special issue of Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Summer 2017), in a special issue on Sylvia Wynter’s Hills of Hebron for Interviewing the Caribbean (April 2023), and cited in Batman and the Multiplicity of Identity: The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero as Cultural Nexus. Lisa has forthcoming articles for Wasafiri and a special issue on Caribbean Medievalisms for postmedieval.
Lisa has previous pedagogical and administrative experience in integrative learning and ePortfolios, and has coauthored work on integrative and experiential learning in the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators’ (NASPA) Spring 2018 newsletter, and a book chapter on ePortfolios, integrative learning, and institutional engagement in Catalyst in Action: Case Studies in High Impact Practice (Stylus 2018). She has previously taught a senior-level, interdisciplinary capstone composition course focused on integrative learning and reflective writing and First Year Writing Seminars with the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines on True Stories and Writing Across Cultures: Monster Hunter Narratives. Her current class is an Expository Writing section titled “Call of Duty”: Feeling Masculine in the Crusading West.
Research Focus
- Old and Middle English poetry
- Arthurian romance
- Comic book & graphic novel studies
- Superhero comics
- Black Feminist literature & theory
- Creative-Theoretical
- Heroism
- Affect theory
- Empathy