Drawing Support: Graphic Narratives and Resistance

Recorded February 29, 2024. In this latest event in the Literature & Resistance series, we explore role comic books and graphic novels are playing in reflecting and critiquing some of the most pressing contemporary issues, and in fostering community and inspiring activism among their readers. From his perspective as a critic, Dr Dom Davies (City University, London) will discuss comics that suggest ways of looking at war and displacement in the Middle East, including the current conflict in Gaza. The writer and artist Timothy Poisson will discuss why comics are his medium of choice for storytelling and activism, reflecting on his work representing the LGBTQ+ community.   This event was inspired by the visit of the Egyptian comics artist Deena Mohamed to the Hub as a guest of the Centre for Resistance Studies in May 2023.   Dr Dom Davies is a Senior Lecturer in English at City, University of London, where he currently directs the BA and MA English programmes. He holds a DPhil and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on the representation of infrastructure in literature, culture, and the visual arts, particularly comics and graphic narratives. He is the author of Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives (2019) and co-editor of Documenting Trauma in Comics (2020). His most recent book is a trade non-fiction title, The Broken Promise of Infrastructure (2023), and he is currently co-authoring a monograph with Professor Candida Rifkind that is called Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (forthcoming 2024). More information about his work is available at www.drdomdavies.com.   Timothy Poisson is an American writer and artist of comic books and graphic novels under the pen name Tim Fish. He’s living in Ireland with a Fulbright grant in affiliation with the Department of History at TCD to research his next graphic novel.  His work has been published by Marvel, Vertigo, Dark Horse, Image, and independently. His last graphic novel, Liebestrasse (as co-creator and illustrator) was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award and named by the American Libraries Association on their official list of best graphic novels in 2022. He currently runs a Young Adult webcomic Please Say It! set in the 1980s, with the mission to inspire activism today. You can visit Tim’s site at www.timfishworks.com. Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/