Visiting Associate Professor
Contact Information
Email: cpizzino@gmu.edu
Phone: 703.993.1110
Mail Stop: Honors College, MSN 1F4
Campus: Fairfax
Office: Horizon Hall 6215
Biography
A professor of contemporary literature, film, and television, Christopher Pizzino is interested in the way storytelling connects to social, moral, political, and philosophical conversations in the modern world. He studies the way we imagine places and regions (such as the southern United States), the way we imagine the future and the past (in historical novels and in science fiction), and the way differing modes of storytelling--some based in words, some in images, some in both--cooperate or clash. Recent courses include a study of the television series The Wire and a survey of the literature and culture of the 1980s.
Selected Publications
“Race, Retconning, and Refraction in HBO’s Watchmen.” The Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century. Forthcoming from Routledge, 2022.
“The Complexities of ‘Closure.’” Forthcoming issue of Law and Humanities, 2022.
“Gutter.” Keywords for Comics Studies. NYU Press, 2021.
“Can a Novel Contain a Comic? Graphic Nerd Ecology in Contemporary US Fiction.” The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities. Palgrave, 2020.
“On Violation: Comic Books, Delinquency, Phenomenology.” Critical Comics Studies. U of Mississippi Press, 2020.
“The Cartoon on the Comics Page: A Phenomenology.” The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies. Oxford UP, 2019.
“When Realism Met Romance: The Negative Zone of Marvel’s Silver Age.” The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel. Cambridge UP, 2018.
“Juvenile, Cruel and MAD: In Defense of Immature Comics.” Comics Studies: Here and Now. Routledge, 2018: 317-332.
“Comics History and the Question of Delinquency: The Case of Criminal.” Comics Memory: Archives and Styles. Palgrave, 2018: 165-185.
“Burn After Reading: Animal Terrorism in Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 42.1 (2017).
“Comics and Trauma: A Postmortem and a New Inquiry.” ImageTexT 9.1 (2017).
Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature. U of Texas P, 2016.
“The Doctor Versus The Dagger: Comics Reading and Cultural Memory.” PMLA 130.3 (2015).
Education
PhD English, Rutgers University, 2008
MA English, Rutgers University, 1998
BA English, Duke University, 1994