Jonathan W. Gray

Jonathan W. Gray, Associate Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center  and John Jay College, works on post-WWII American culture, African American literary production, popular culture, comic books and graphic novels, and narratives of visual culture. His first book, Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination (Mississippi) traces changes in white literary production during the period between the Brown case and the death of Martin Luther King.  His forthcoming project, Illustrating the Race (Columbia), investigates how the twin understandings of illustration—the creative act of depiction and the political act of bringing forth for public consideration—function in the representation of African Americans in comics and graphic narratives published since 1966.  Prof. Gray co-edited the essay collection Disability in Comics and Graphic Novels for Palgrave McMillian and served as founding editor of the Journal of Comics and Culture (Pace).  Prof. Gray’s journalism on popular culture has appeared in The New Republic, Entertainment Weekly, Salon.com, Medium, and the New Inquiry.