Kate Kelp-Stebbins

Dr. Kate Kelp-Stebbins (she/her/hers) or Dr. K—as her students call her—is Associate Professor of English and sometimes Director of Comics and Cartoon Studies at the University of Oregon. 

Her research examines comics and visual media as tools for rethinking world literature and remapping transnational media flows. Her book, How Comics Travel: Translation, Publication, Radical Literacies (2022), uses comparative approaches to understand the racialized, gendered, and culturally specific components of reading comics around the world. She is also the curator of The Art of the News: Comics Journalism (2021-23) exhibition, which premiered at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene before travelling to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum at the Ohio State University. 

She is a lifelong comics lover and counts herself fortunate to have the opportunity to share comics with students and to explore the mysteries and complexities of this medium. She starts glitching if asked to name a favorite comic, but she has published extensively on Indigenous comics, queer comics, anticolonial comics, antiracist comics, comics journalism, feminist comics, and comics translation.