Julian Chambliss

Julian C. Chambliss is a Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University, and co-director of the Department of English Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (DHLC). A comics scholar working at the intersection of Critical Afrofuturism, Black Digital Humanities, and Popular Culture History, he examines race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. His writing has appeared in Scholarly Editing, Genealogy, KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, and The Conversation US.

Chambliss’s scholarship centers comics as both a cultural archive and an analytical system. He is co-editor of Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience (2013) and Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural, and Geopolitical Domain (2018). His essays on comics and visual culture appear in Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics (2023), More Critical Approaches to Comics (2019), and The Ages of Black Panther (2020). His digital humanities and comics projects foreground critical making, pedagogy, and data-driven cultural analysis. He leads and collaborates on initiatives such as Comics as Data North America (CaDNA), which uses MSU library catalog data and computational methods to map and interpret North American comics culture.

As a curator, Chambliss develops exhibitions that translate comics scholarship and DH methods into public-facing storytelling. His museum work includes Beyond the Black Panther: Visions of Afrofuturism in American Comics, alongside comics history exhibitions such as Take Off! Comic Artists from the Great White North (2019), Comics and the City (2020), and Justice for All: Social Justice in Comics (2022). He also curated Techno: The Rise of Detroit’s Machine Music, extending his Black digital humanities and Critical Afrofuturist commitments to the histories of sound, technology, and place.

Grounded in Black digital humanities and Critical Afrofuturist frameworks, his broader work includes Mapping Afrofuturism: Understanding Black Speculative Practice (2024) and Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (2018). He co-produced and directed Afrofantastic: The Transformative World of Afrofuturism (WKAR PBS) and has contributed to exhibitions on Afrofuturism and visual culture at institutions including the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts and Florida International University’s Frost Art Museum. In 2022, he was featured on the Terrestrial Space Panel at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Claiming Space symposium.

Chambliss is also a prolific public humanist and audio storyteller. He co-produced and hosted Every Tongue Got to Confess (2017–2022), which received the 2019 Hampton Dunn New Media Award from the Florida Historical Society. His most recent documentary podcast series, RISE: Detroit’s Machine Music (2025), examines the origin story of techno in Detroit through the people, places, and technologies that shaped that signature Afrofuturist sound.

His dedicated Afrofuturism website is www.afrofantastic.com.

His website is www.julianchambliss.com.