Qiana Whitted

Dr. Qiana Whitted is Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. Originally from Virginia, she earned her BA degree in English from Hampton University and her MA and PhD degrees in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale University. While at Yale, she was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. Her research and teaching focus on Black literary and cultural studies with an emphasis on race, genre, and history in American comics and graphic novels.

Professor Whitted received the Will Eisner Industry Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work in 2020 for her book, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest. In 2023, she was also awarded the Edited Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society and an Eisner nomination for her collection, Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of Comics.  Other publications include the co-edited collection, Comics and the U.S. South (with Brannon Costello) and the book, “A God of Justice?” The Problem of Evil in 20th Century Black Literature, as well as essays that explore southern studies, speculative fiction, romance fiction, and religious studies. Additionally, she has served as editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society from 2019-2023 and chair of the International Comic Arts Forum from 2017-2023.