Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where she is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the German Program.

Before joining the faculty at UBC and returning home to Vancouver, she taught at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington (2018-2019) and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Freie Universität in Berlin (2017-2018). She graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2017.

In 2023, Biz established the UBC Comics Studies Cluster, where she continues to support community partners, local nonprofits, BC’s First Nations, and UBC faculty and students in making comics about the important issues facing society today. She is also the Director of UBC’s Popular Media for Social Change Research Excellence Cluster, otherwise known as the Pop Culture Cluster (PopCC) and is the Academic Director on the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum.

Beyond her work in popular media, Biz also co-leads the Narratives Research Group in the UBC Centre for Migration Studies, sits on the Advisory Board for the UBC Public Humanities Hub, and co-leads the Faculty of Arts’ Languages Max Working Group.  She is also the Equity Chair for German Studies Canada and sits on the Board of the Vancouver Westside German School

Biz’s research and teaching are grounded in the belief that popular culture is capable of both reflecting social and political discourse and intervening in it. Biz’s scholarship examines the representation of complex histories in comics and digital and tabletop games, Tarot’s capacity for innovating classroom teaching, and the role of comics and arts-based research in preserving Indigenous knowledges, sharing Indigenous storytelling traditions, and revitalizing Indigenous languages.

Biz is currently completing her book manuscript, Graphic Historiography: History & Memory through Comics and Graphic Novels (Ohio State University Press), which she began as a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo (2019-2021).

Student Outreach

Biz is the Faculty Organizer of Arts Multilingual Week (AMW) since 2022.

AMW is an annual event that celebrates multilingualism, instructed language learning, and language diversity at UBC Vancouver. Initially supported through funding from the Dean’s Office, AMW has grown into an annual, collaborative initiative involving over twenty students clubs and departments and units across the Faculty of Arts. 

The next Arts Multilingual Week will take place in October 2026. If you’d like to learn more or get involved, email arts.multilingual@ubc.ca.

2022: “Playing Against Real Time: Queer(ing) Temporalities in Bury me, my Love (2017),” Game Studies 22.1 (March 2022): n.p.

2022: “Recentering Indigenous Epistemologies through Digital Games: Sámi Perspectives on Nature in Rievssat (2018),” Games and Culture. Special Issue: Indigenous Games (2022), pp. 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211068086

2022: “Sami Digital Storytelling: Survivance and Revitalization in Indigenous Digital Games,” New Media & Society, September 3 (2021), pp. 1-24, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211038902

2022: “The Smartphone Aesthetics of Mobility in Kate Evans’ Threads and Reinhard Kleist’s An Olympic Dream,” Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 12. 2 (October 2021): pp. 513-534.

2022: “Banning ‘Maus’ only exposes the significance of this searing graphic novel about the Holocaust,” The Conversation, February 8^th, 2022, approx. 15 000 reads

2022: “From Posters to Panels and Panels to Posters: Fluidity of Form in Feuchtenberger’s Comics and Graphic Art,” invited chapter in Geschichte des Comics. Studien zu Epochen, Ländern und Einzelwerken, edited by Bernd Dolle-Weinkauff, Ch. A. Bachmann Verlag.

2021: “Tying Up Loose Ends: The Fabric of Panel Borders in Kate Evans’ Threads.” Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, special issue: “Migration in Twenty-First-Century Documentary Comics,” 5.2 (summer 2021): 79-99.

2021: “’What’s in a name?’: Anke Feuchtenberger’s Roses and the Mythic Methodologies of her Feminist Comics Art,” invited chapter in Comic art and feminism in the Baltic Sea region: Transnational perspectives, edited by Kristy Beers Fägersten, Anna Nordenstam, Margareta Wallin Wictorin, and Leena Romu, Routledge.

2021: “Comics Studies in German Studies” (co-authored with Olivia Albiero), DDGC Blog.

2021: “How Comics Shed Light into Refugee Border Crossing Experiences,” The Conversation, June 15^th, 2021 (for World Refugee Day), approx. 2000 reads.

2020:  “The Social Justice Work of German Comics and Graphic Literature,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, special issue: “German Comics and Graphic Novels,” 56.4.

2020: “Editors’ Notes” (co-authored with Charlotte Schallié), Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, special issue: “German Comics and Graphic Novels,” 56.4.

2020: “Towards a Graphic Historicity: Representing the East German Past in the German Graphic Novel,” invited chapter in Comics of the New Europe: Intersections and Reflections, edited by Martha Kuhlman and Jose Alaniz, European Graphic Novels series, University of Leuven Press.

Biz was recently awarded a Diversity and Inclusion Grant in German Studies from the Waterloo Centre for German Studies for the second time for her project “Games for Decolonization.” This project has also been awarded a Seed Grant and Faculty Fellowship from the UBC Public Humanities Hub and a SoTL Seed Grant from CTLT.

Her first award of this grant was for her project to develop educational tools and curricular content that engage Indigenous methodologies and activate Indigenous systems of knowledge in German studies teaching and research. Beyond finding intersections between German studies and Indigenous studies, Biz’s work aims to support UBC’s German Program in meeting the goals of UBC’s Indigenous Strategic Plan, seeking to model how German studies might also respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.

In 2022, Biz’s GSMT 121: German Fairy Tales and Popular Culture (in English) won the 2022 Innovate German Award for its integration of social-justice-oriented methodologies and Indigenous storytelling traditions.

Biz has been the recipient of multiple SSHRC grants, including a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship (2015) and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2019-2021).