Ramzi Fawaz is an award-winning queer cultural critic, public speaker, and educator. He is the author of two books including The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016), and Queer Forms (2022). His popular writing on feminist and queer media, American cultural politics, and superhero comics regularly appears in the LA Review of Books's online channels Avidly and The Philosophical Salon. In 2019-2020, Fawaz was a Stanford Humanities Center fellow. He is currently a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
In a recent article for On Wisconsin Magazine, journalist Jessica Steinhoff tells the story of Fawaz's career trajectory, from a teenage superhero comic book fan to a nationally recognized popular culture scholar. You can read the story here.
News & Events
Fawaz recently completed a national tour to promote his second book Queer Forms, which was published by NYU Press in September 2022. He held public events at renowned bookstores like The Strand in New York City and Book Soup in Los Angeles. He engaged in public conversations with artists, scholars, and curators like MacArthur Award-winning Professor Nicole Fleetwood, Black queer visual artist Maurice Harris, and legendary cabaret performer Mx. Justin Vivian Bond. And he presented his research at numerous universities including the University of Chicago, NYU, Duke, the California College of the Arts, and Virginia Tech. * Throughout Fall 2022, Fawaz also recorded podcast episodes for the New Books Network, NPR's Pop Life, and Skylight Bookstore. These episodes provide an accessible and dynamic introduction to Fawaz's scholarship, while showcasing his distinctive take on contemporary popular culture and social change. Links to each of these dialogues can be found under the media tab. * In Spring of 2023, Fawaz will continue sharing his new work at the University of Texas, Austin, USC, and George Washington University, where he will give the annual Mergen-Palmer Lecture for the department of American Studies (his doctoral degree Alma Mater). *In December 2022, Fawaz's co-edited volume Keywords for Comics Studies, was selected as a Choice Oustanding Academic Title for 2022. Keywords was co-edited with preeminant American Studies scholars Deborah E. Whaley and Shelley Streeby. * Fawaz's next research article, "Feminism is for Beginners: Learning from Straight Men Doing Queer Feminism," will be published in the March 2023 special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly titled "Feminism's Bad Objects." * In the meantime, Fawaz is embarking on research for a new book titled "Literary Theory on Acid." In this project, he argues for the importance of literary and cultural studies perspectives on the contemporary psychedelic renaissance. In Spring 2022, Fawaz published an article based on this developing research, which appeared in a special issue of American Literary History. A link to this essay can be found under the essays tab.