BIO
Candida Rifkind has a BA (Hon.) in English from Dalhousie University (Halifax, NS), an MA in English from Concordia University (Montreal, PQ), and a PhD in English from York University (Toronto, ON). She is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg, where she specializes in alternative comics and graphic narratives, Canadian popular and political writing, and feminist auto/biography theory.
Her co-written book, The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (with Sonja Boon, Laurie McNeill, and Julie Rak) was published in 2023 and she co-edited a special issue of Canadian Literature with Zachary Rondinelli on “The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Canadian Comics” (volume 249, 2022).
Her most recent co-edited book is Documenting Trauma: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories & Graphic Reportage in Comics (Palgrave 2020), a collection of 16 essays and 3 original comics that won Honourable Mention for the 2021 Comics Studies Society Edited Book Prize. She also co-edited volume 35.2 of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies on “Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives.” Her co-edited scholarly collection, Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2016), won the 2016 Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best book in English Canadian literary criticism. Her scholarly monograph, Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature and the 1930s Canadian Left (University of Toronto Press, 2009), received the 2009 Ann Saddlemyer Award for the best book published on a Canadian theatre topic.
Recent publications in Comics Studies include journal articles on the graphic memoirs of Geneviève Castrée, the history of Marie Curie comics and Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive, graphic biographies of Robert Oppenheimer and the figure of the atomic scientist, and book chapters on graphic narratives of migrant detention centres and refugee camps; photography, immigration, and race in Lila Quintero Weaver’s graphic memoir Darkroom; the gothic representation of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit People in Will I See? (co-author), and metabiography and black visuality in Ho Che Anderson’s comics biography, King. Recent publications in Canadian Studies include book chapters on the public memorialization and biomythology of Dr. Norman Bethune, the biotopographies of Seth’s “picture novella” George Sprott, and visual nostalgias of the Canadian company town. She was awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant (2015-18) to research graphic biography and a SSHRC Aid to Small Universities Grant (2018) to coordinate the open access resource Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography (Jeunesse, 2019, 2022).
Dr. Rifkind is currently co-authoring a book titled Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics with Dominic Davies (under contract with Wilfrid Laurier UP).
She served four years on the Executive Board of the Comics Studies Society (President 2019-20) and serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of the journals iNKS, Canadian Literature, and Studies in Canadian Literature. She regularly reviews comics and graphic narratives for the Winnipeg Free Press. With Barbara Postema and Nhora Serrano, she is co-editor of the new Wilfrid Laurier University Press book series Crossing Lines: Transcultural/Transnational Comics Studies. In Fall 2019, she co-organized the first One Book UW program at the University of Winnipeg on the Indigenous comics anthology This Place: 150 Years Retold.
c.rifkind [at] uwinnipeg.ca
Department of English
University of Winnipeg
515 Portage Ave
Winnipeg MB
CANADA R3B 2E9
