Documenting Lives

Smita Jha is a Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Roorkee, India. She has published more than 65 papers in refereed journals of literature by Routledge, SAGE, and OUP, and has six books to her credit, the recent one from Bloomsbury, India. She was shortlisted for the Nehru Fulbright Fellowship in 2013, and the Advanced Study Centre Shimla fellowship in 2011, while received the British Columbia fellowship in 2009, and the prestigious Indo-Canadian Shastri Fellowship in 2019. She is the recipient of the Adele Mellen Presidential Award for distinguished scholarship by Edwin Mellen Press, New York. Her present areas of research include comics and graphic narratives and Medical Humanities. Dr Jha has participated in 50+ international conferences and led academic. Abhilasha Gusain is an Assistant Professor of English in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Management, National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) Surathkal. She completed her PhD (2024) from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Roorkee. Her dissertation examined the graphical representation of the Vietnam War, particularly exploring the themes of trauma, ethics of representation, memory, history, and violence, through the reading of graphic narratives. Her research outputs are published in journals like Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Visual Studies, and 3L: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies. She has presented her work at various international conferences, including the University of Cambridge. She is also the recipient of ‘The Sabin Award for Comics Scholarship’ (2022). She holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Delhi. Her research interest lies in Comics Studies. Amritha R Krishnan is a doctoral research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee and was a Fulbright scholar at Stony Brook University, New York (2023-2024). Her ongoing doctoral work concentrates on chronic illness narratives by women and graphic medicine. The larger fields within which her doctoral research is embedded are medical humanities, gender studies, memory studies and visual studies. She has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences, including “The Child of the Future” Conference hosted by the University of Cambridge, where she also mediated a session. Her research articles have appeared in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.

• Documenting Activism, Drawing Resistance: An Introduction.- This Can’t Be America Intersecting Communities in Big Black Stand at Attica.- Transitional justice and comic books: racial injustice and resistance in the work of Marcelo D’Salete.- The Foregrounding of Intersectionality and Disability Experiences through Focalization Techniques in Alison Bechdel’s The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (2008).- Beyond Graphic Medicine: Reproductive Choice Comics in the Contemporary U.S.- Superhero Healthcare.- Visualizing Crip/Queer Time in Comics Life Writing: A Meta-Autobiographical Graphic Essay.- “Innocence Lost”: Unplanned Motherhood, Child Abuse, and Survival through Brutality in Halim Mahmoudi’s graphic novel Little Mama.