CENES Welcomes Dr. Biz Nijdam as New Assistant Professor without Review in German Studies. Prior to joining the faculty at UBC, Dr. Nijdam was Visiting Assistant Professor in German Studies and Film & Media Studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. From 2017-2018, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Dr. Nijdam specializes in German comics and the graphic novel, German art history and visual culture, and GDR studies.
In the 2019/20 academic year, Dr. Nijdam will teach courses in the German language program as well as a course on German comic studies and memory culture for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
Could you tell us a little about yourself and what has brought you to UBC?
I actually grew up in Vancouver, so I am as excited about coming home as I am about joining the UBC faculty. I have always loved the UBC campus and rode my bike around the University Endowment Lands as a child. However, I am particularly excited to be joining CENES because of the strong community of scholars working in the department and the many opportunities I’m already encountering to learn from my colleagues.
A major part of your research concerns German comic studies. What brought you to this area of studies?
I came to comics rather late for a comics scholar. While most scholars working in my field were flipping through comics before they could even read, I only started reading graphic novels as an undergraduate student at the University of Victoria. Then while working on my PhD, I began looking at German comics as teaching tools for language pedagogy. With my education in art history and literary studies, it now seems so obvious that I would turn to comics as my primary research material, but I also see comics and graphic novels as a fantastic way to engage language learners.
Can you tell us a bit about your book project, Pannelled Pasts: History, Media, and Memory in the German Graphic Novel?
My book manuscript, Panelled Pasts: History, Media, and Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel (under contract with Ohio State University Press), examines how comics have become an important form for popular investigations of East German experience. Analyzing twelve graphic novels and webcomics themetizing life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), I examine how the comics medium negotiates the divide between history and memory at the intersection of text and image. Engaging media studies theory, my book project investigates how comics and graphic novels have intervened in debates on the politics of German unification and the representation of East German identity. I argue that interpretations of historical events in the comics medium – even when fictionalized – are an important avenue for imparting historical experience. The fundamental interventions of my work, however, bring German comics and graphic novels into conversation with other discourses surrounding post-unification memory culture and media politics, positioning comic art as an essential but heretofore unacknowledged element of post-1989 German art history and activism.
My next book project, Comics Feminism: Politics at the Intersection of Art and Methodology (under review with Routledge Press), looks at the comics of German artist Anke Feuchtenberger, Canadian cartoonists Julie Doucet and Fiona Smyth, and Swedish comics artist Liv Strömquist through the lens of feminist art historical discourse, specifically on the graphic arts and theatrical and performance art, to identify common strategies in this body of graphic literature through the conventions of 20th and 21st century feminist art. Situating the political interventions made by Feuchtenberger, Doucet, Smyth, and Strömquist in the context of other innovations in feminist art, I set their work in dialogue with feminist movements in other media, ultimately demonstrating their position in the larger category of feminist artistic production and feminist art history.
