Dr. Erin La Cour is Assistant Professor in English Literature and Visual Culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her published research focuses on both the intermediality and mediality of comics in several socio-historical cultural milieux, and most recently on Graphic Medicine. She has also co-edited four comics studies collections, Comics and Power: Representing and Questioning Culture, Subjects, and Communities (Cambridge Scholars, 2015) and “Comics in Art/Art in Comics” (Image [&] Narrative, 2016), and the forthcoming “Graphic Medicine” (Biography, 2022) and Key Terms in Comics Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). She is also a Comenius Fellow of The Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO), for which she conducted the project “Opening a Dialogue about Mental Health through Comics and Creative Writing (www.dialoguinghealth.com).

Rik Spanjers is a lecturer in the Modern Dutch Literature department at both Utrecht University and Utrecht University College. His PhD project, Comics Realism and the Maus Event, at the University of Amsterdam will be published in 2022 with the University Press of Mississippi. In 2014, he worked as a researcher for the exhibition “Cool Japan,” which was staged in 2017 at the National Museum of Ethnology Leiden and in the summer of 2018 in the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. He also writes reviews for Aniway and Stripschrift, two leading Dutch comics magazines.

Vasiliki (Vasso) Belia is a PhD candidate at the Department of Literature and Art, Maastricht University. In her research, Vasiliki studies contemporary graphic narratives that engage with the history of feminism and negotiate its meaning in the present. Vasso previously worked as lecturer and researcher at the Gender Studies Programme, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University (2015-2020). She holds bachelor’s degrees in Theatre Studies and English Language and Literature (University of Athens), a master’s degree in Cultural Management (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences), and a research master’s degree in Gender Studies (Utrecht University).

Freija Camps is a lecturer in Literature and Society at the Free University Amsterdam (VU), editor-in-chief of the graduate journal Digressions, and Internship Director at Amsterdam Comics. Freija completed a two-year Master’s degree in Gender and Ethnicity Studies at Utrecht University, after receiving an MA degree in Literary Studies from the VU. Her research interests include graphic medicine, disability studies, and feminist visual culture. Recently, her research has brought together comics studies and affect theory to explore resonances of mania and depression in autobiographical comics.

Nicholas Burman is a writer, event assistant, and student from the UK, based in Amsterdam. He conducts interviews with the underground music scene for MusicMap, writes about the Dutch creative environment on the Skandl Notebook, and is a regular contributor for independent free-paper Amsterdam Alternative. He is currently studying Literature and Society at the VU Amsterdam, where he is also on the board for the Expanded Field creative writing journal and has most recently been the production assistant for the ASAP/Amsterdam Symposium 2018.