Jonathan Najarian

Candidate statement

Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, Colgate University
As a scholar whose research and teaching moves between the boundaries of literary modernism, art history, and visual culture studies, I’m well-suited to serve as Interdisciplinary Chair of the MSA, and to represent the interests of scholars working across disciplines. I am the editor of Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture (2024), a project that was necessarily an interdisciplinary undertaking. Comics is a medium that insists that readers move across and between the boundaries between word and image; the essays in Comics and Modernism, moreover, come from scholars working from backgrounds in literary studies, art history, film and media studies, and textual culture studies and print history. My scholarly interests extend beyond comics studies, and I am continually motivated by questions of formal uncertainty: are books that are written and illustrated by painters, such as Rockwell Kent’s provocative travel narratives, properly the domain of literature or art history? What aesthetic sensibilities do we bring to, say, the richly illustrated journals of Frieda Kahlo, which seamlessly weave words and images, or the wordless narratives of Lynd Ward, which tell sophisticated, elaborate stories entirely through the progression of images? Below are publications that attest to the interdisciplinary focus of my scholarship.