Rebecca Wanzo, professor and chair of women, gender, and sexuality studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won two major awards in the field of comic book studies.
Professor Wanzo’s The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (New York University Press, 2020) won the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work. Named for pioneering comics creator and graphic novelist Will Eisner, the Eisner Awards are among the comic book industry’s most prestigious honors. She also was awarded the 2021 Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society. The first professional society of comics scholars in the United States, the CSS is committed to the critical study of comics; improving comics teaching; and engaging in open and ongoing conversations about the comics world.
Previously, Profesor Wanzo won the Katherine Singer KovaÌcs Book Award for outstanding scholarship in cinema and media studies from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is also the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (State University of New York Press, 2009).
Dr. Wonzo joined the faculty at Washington University in 2011 after teaching at Ohio State University. She is a graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she majored in English and history. Professor Wonzon earned a Ph.D. in English at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.