About

Please redirect to newer version at www.kaysohini.com as I do not
update this site anymore, thanks!

As a PhD Candidate at Stony Brook University, I am currently drawing my doctoral dissertation as a comic. In both my creative and academic work, I focus on how comics can be utilized by scholars and artists alike in ethnography, in narrative medicine, in literary activism, in resisting dominant discourses.

My work on comics has been published in (Eisner winning!) Women Write About Comics, Inside Higher Ed, Sequentials, Assay: A Journal of Non-fiction Studies, amongst others. My upcoming works include a short comic in Graphic Mundi’s (Penn State University Press) COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology, and a chapter on queerness and cartoonists of color in de Gruyter’s Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives. Earlier this year, I received the Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship to fund the fieldwork for my graphic ethnographic project “Resistance During the Fall of the World’s Largest Democracy”; that aims to image textually capture the resistance movement against rising xenophobia in India, which has been exacerbated in the wake of COVID-19. I am also secretary on the executive committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF).

Peer Reviewed Publications and essays in edited volumes:

  •  “The Graphic Memoir as a Transitional Object” Assay: A Journal of Non-fiction Studies (March 2019). Web.
  • “Comics in the Age of Digitization” Sequentials, vol. 1, no. 4, 2020.
  • “On the Threshold of Being and Belonging” Chapter in an Edited Collection Comics and Catharsis: Exploring Narratives of Trauma and Memory in the Graphic Novel. (Forthcoming)
  • “The Queerness of Being” Chapter in Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives (Forthcoming)
  • “Pandemic Precarities”; COVID-19 Anthology, Graphic Mundi Imprint/Penn State University Press. Expected early 2021
  • “Drawing Intersectionality: Comics, Neurodiversity and New Subjectivities”; in MLA (Modern Language Association) Volume Neurofutures. Forthcoming.

Other Writing:

• “I Draw (A Graphic Dissertation), Therefore I am”, Women Write About Comics, September 2020. Part I.
• “Comics as Method and as Holding Environments”, Women Write About Comics, October 2020. Part II.

• Review of Commute by Erin Williams, Extra Inks, June 2020.

• “Mental Health, Comics, the Grad Student”, in Gradhacker, Inside Higher Ed, March 2020.

• ”International Student Precarity in the Humanities Academy” in         Gradhacker, Inside Higher Ed, April 2020.

• Section on “Graduate Studies in the Time of Coronavirus”, MLA Grads. April 2020.

• “A Medley of Multi-modal Projects”, Insider Higher Ed, June 2020. 

Conferences:
• “Reinventing Form: A Recent History of Interactive Comics, Audio Comics and Comics in Augmented Reality” in the Roundtable New Flashpoints in Comics History organized by Forum for Comics and Graphic Narratives, MLA 2021, Toronto [Upcoming]

• “Twice Othered: Ecological Imperialism and Settler Colonialism in The Rabbits” in the panel The Other in Narratives of Rival Nations organized by the Children’s Literature Association, MLA 2021, Toronto [Upcoming]

• “Subverting dominant Discourses through Interactive Graphic Narratives” Modern Language Association (MLA); January 2020, Seattle.

• “Institutional Contexts and the Shaping and Re-Shaping of Power”, Modern Language Association (MLA); January 2020, Seattle.

• “Comics, Multiple Marginalities and the Queerness of Being” in the panel Comics and Shaping of Identities: Queer Spaces and Gendered Places; March 2020, NeMLA Boston

• “Creating an Online Presence via HCommons Blog”, A Humanities Commons Twitter Conference, July 2019.

• “You Are Not Your Illness: Narrativizing Identity in Disability and Illness Memoirs”, Modern Language Association (MLA); January 2019, Chicago.

• “Across Borders and In-Between Spaces” at the South Asian Literary Association (SALA); January 2019, Chicago, 2019.

• “Kamala Khan as Miss Marvel: On Being a Brown, Muslim, Immigrant Superhero”; 50th Anniversary Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA); Washington DC 2019.

• “Artistic Resistance and Drawing Girlhood” Creative Panel on Writing Girlhood at NeMLA; March 2019.

•  “Objects, Emotions, and Neocolonialism in Graphic Narratives.” Literature as Activism, 30th Annual Graduate Conference, Stony Brook University, New York, January 2018.

• “Seeing is Saying: Postcolonial Identity Crisis and Resistance in Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir.” Doing Graphic Stories National Conference, Jadavpur University, India, January 12-14, 2017

Panels, Roundtables and Conferences Organized:

• Organizer of the Roundtable Session “Comics and Illness: Mediating Trauma through Image-Textual Encounters”, MLA 2021. Selected for the Presidential theme “Persistence.”
• Organizer of the Roundtable Session “Graphic Narratives and Multiple Marginalities” at Modern Language Association 2020, Seattle.
• Organizer of the Creative Panel “Who Belongs, Who Does Not: The Use of Comics as Literatures of Resistance”, at Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) 2020, Boston.
• Organizing Committee Member of Gradcon 2020, Stony Brook University.

Awards, Grants:
• Edward Guiliano Global Fellowship for project titled titled “Resistance During the Fall of the World’s Largest Democracy”
• SBGSO Distinguished Travel Award for presenting on International student precarious for organizing a roundtable on graphic narratives and multiple marginalities Modern Language Association, 2020, Seattle.
• MLA Travel Grant for Graduate Students, January 2019; for MLA 2019, Chicago.
• SBU English Dept Graduate Student Travel Award, January, 2019; for MLA 2019.
• GES Conference funding, May, 2019; for SALA 2019.
• GSEU Professional Development Award, 2019; for NeMLA 2019.

Social Media Profiles and Digital Portfolio:

Twitter: @KaySohini
https://www.kaysohini.com/

Contact:
sohini.kumar@stonybrook.edu
kaysohini@gmail.com