Harriet EH Earle FHEA, PhD, MA, MATM, BA (Hons)

My research focuses on violence and trauma in visual forms, primarily comics but also film and television. I am particularly interested in how visual forms recreate the traumatic/violence experience on the space of the page/screen.

Although I am primarily a theoretician, I teach on the Creative Writing BA and very much enjoy bringing my research into the practical arena. I particularly interested in socially-engaged writing and the ways in which we can use our creative outputs as tools for social engagement and social change, a theme that comes through in all my teaching. 

I am Editor of Comics Forum, an online journal of comics scholarship, and regularly peer review for a number of international journals. I am currently co-editing a special issue of The European Journal of American Culture on American Horror Story.

Specialist areas of interest

Writing with images
Socially-engaged writing
Comics studies
Representations of traumatic experience and violence
Science Fiction
Conflict and war narratives

Subject area

English

Courses

Creative Writing

Modules

• Story and Image (BA level 4 core module)
• Introduction to Critical Theory (BA level 4 core module)
• Creative Writing: Short Story (BA Level 5 core module)
• Science Fiction and Fantasy (BA level 6 option module)

My research focuses on biopolitics and violence in visual culture. I am looking at how different forms of biopolitical operations are represented in Anglophone comics

My research not only considers representation but also the question of 'so what'? I want to write about why we should care about these issues. What is it about the current climate that makes these comics important documents in the wider discussions of people and politics?

Journal articles

Earle, H., & Clark, J. (2019). Telling national stories in American Horror Story. European journal of American culture, 38 (1), 5-13. http://doi.org/10.1386/ejac.38.1.5_7

Earle, H. (2018). A new face for an old fight: Reimagining Vietnam in Vietnamese-American graphic memoirs. Studies in Comics, 9 (1), 87-105. http://doi.org/10.1386/stic.9.1.87_1

Earle, H. (2018). Conflict then; trauma now : reading Vietnam across the decades in American comics. European Journal of American Culture, 37 (2), 159-172. http://doi.org/10.1386/ejac.37.2.159_1

Earle, H. (2017). “A Convenient Place for Inconvenient People”: madness, sex and the asylum in American Horror Story. The Journal of Popular Culture, 50 (2), 259-275. http://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12508

Earle, H. (2017). Epistemic Breaks, Post-9/11 Trauma, and Siri Hustvedt. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 30 (3), 198-202. http://doi.org/10.1080/0895769x.2016.1273753

Knowles, S., Peacock, J., & Earle, H. (2016). Introduction: Trans/formation and the graphic novel. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 52 (4), 378-384. http://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2016.1228513

Earle, H. (2016). Strange migrations: an essay/interview with Shaun Tan. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 52 (4), 385-398. http://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2016.1219139

Earle, H. (2016). Creating the traumatic body : female genitals as wounds in Antichrist. Film International, 14 (1), 35-43. http://doi.org/10.1386/fiin.14.1.35_1

Earle, H.E.H. (2014). My Friend Dahmer: The comic as Bildungsroman. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5 (4), 429-440. http://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2014.916329

Book chapters

Earle, H. (2019). Persepolis. In Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives. De Gruyter

Earle, H. (2019). Comics and Graphic Novels. In The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction. Routledge

Books

Earle, H.E.H. (2019). Gender, Sexuality and Queerness in American Horror Story Critical Essays. McFarland.

Earle, H. (2017). Comics, trauma, and the new art of war. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/2024

PhD in History and Visual Narratives (2nd supervisor)