Nick Sousanis to join the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies!

We are extremely pleased to welcome Nick Sousanis to our full-time faculty beginning Fall 2016!

Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Comics Studies at the University of Calgary, Nick received his doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2014, where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comic book form. Published a year later by Harvard University Press, Unflattening argues for the importance of visual thinking in teaching and learning. Before coming to New York City, Nick was immersed in Detroit’s thriving arts community, where he co-founded the arts and culture site thedetroiter.com and became the biographer of legendary Detroit artist Charles McGee.

At Columbian's Teachers College, Parsons, and the University of Calgary, Nick has developed and taught courses on comics as powerful communication tools, including, most recently, Comics as a Way of Thinking. We look forward to integrating his innovative curriculum into our Humanities and Liberal Studies programs.

Nick’s work has been featured with reviews and interviews in such places as The Paris Review, The New York Times, PrintMag, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Publishers Weekly, Microsoft’s Daily Edventures, and Russia’s Theory & Practice for the new possibilities for scholarship that it represents. (See full list here.) In addition to numerous academic conference presentations, he’s been featured in several academic gatherings around alternative scholarship, including most recently HUMlab/Umeå University in Sweden and the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC. He has given invited public talks at Stanford University, UCLA, and Microsoft Research (which also hosted an exhibition of the work), and keynote addresses at the annual conferences of the Visitor Studies Association and the International Visual Literacy Association. Recent comics include “Against the Flow” and “Upwards” in The Boston Globe, and The Fragile Framework, co-authored with Rich Monastersky for Nature.