Comparative Literature graduate student Nick Wirtz has an article forthcoming in the journal Punctum. Titled “The Repeatable Hand and the Mediated Self in Mira Jacob’s Good Talk.” The essay is to be published this March in a special issue on “The Social, Political and Ideological Semiotics of Comics and Cartoons.” The article explores Jacob’s use of digital collage and vector-drawn “paper dolls” with a focus on her refusal to enact the subjectivity expected of a racialized subject. Shifting much of the intersubjective emotional work from the autobiographer and to the reader, Jacob’s innovative digital mode presents a formal invitation to read, and to see, the other’s experience without the illusion of equivalence.

Wirtz has also published two essays in The Art of the News, edited by UO faculty Katherine Kelp-Stebbins and Ben Saunders. The essays are “Currents and Countercurrents: Victoria Lomasko’s The Russian Constitution Was Changed,” and “Reflections on Absence: Sarah Mirk and Maki Naro’s Guantanamo Voices.” The former discusses Lomasko’s visual citation of Byzantine iconography in her activist reportage to both visualize the political ramifications of extending Putin’s term limits and assert the possibility of social resistance; the latter analyzing characters’ gazes as a way of drawing attention to the relationships of legal and visual representability.