Anna Sophia Flood (English) is a 2024–2025 HRI Graduate Fellow. Her research project, “Slavery’s Eerie Presence: The Graphic Gothic’s Capturing of Dark Histories and Distorted Futures,” introduces the notion of the Graphic Gothic to investigate speculative graphic novels.
Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.
What is unique about your research on this topic?
The main goal of my research agenda is to find new ways to approach and analyze literary representations of history and the future. My dissertation project, titled “Slavery’s Eerie Presence: The Graphic Gothic’s Capturing of Dark Histories and Distorted Futures,” analyzes Black speculative graphic novels and their employment of the Afro-Gothic tradition. I am specifically establishing a unique approach of the Graphic Gothic, to engage visual narratives that portray histories of slavery and the realities that are haunted by this dark past. Each graphic novel that I engage with reimagines narrative and offers a new perspective of speaking back to history and thinking with the future. At the center of my interest lies a commitment to the reparative potentials of Black speculative fiction and the pedagogical possibilities of these graphic texts. I engage with scholars in Black comics studies, Afro gothic studies, Black feminist studies, and theories surrounding affect, memory, and intergenerational ways of processing history.
What drives your interest in this research?
The fact that I am pursuing a PhD in literature studies is ironic because my inner child never liked to read. I always felt disconnected from the books I was made to read for school due to lack of representation, and I felt insecure about my ability to read because of my comprehension level determined by a generic standardized test. As I got older, I found that English teachers were my main confidants and eventually, I tapped into my inner researcher after completing projects on Sonia Sanchez and August Wilson. I do this work for the kids like me who carry a generational insecurity with learning, who can’t seem to connect with the classroom created without them in mind. I do this in hope that the reparative work that so many Black authors and artists engage in can be properly distributed and talked about to tend to the wounds of history and address the gaps in education that continue to foster a collective amnesia of slavery’s past and present.
Anna Sophia Flood
Graduate Fellow
How has the fellowship seminar shaped the way you’re approaching your research?
My experience in the HRI seminar has been rich and full of life-giving energy. The cohort is strongly aligned in interests and during my seminar there was a powerful discussion centered around the interdisciplinary approaches and various angles in my work. The seminar restored and possibly even planted my own ability to see the strength in my project. This work I do is for those who are coming after me and in honor of those who have come before me. There is no escaping history and the literary offers a unique return and confrontation with the past that is often silenced and repressed, and the seminar confirmed that this work must be done. It is truly an honor to be in community amongst my colleagues in the format of the seminar and beyond.
Book covers shown above, left to right: Victor LaValle’s Destroyer by Victor LaValle (Author) and Dietrich Smith (Illustrator), published by BOOM! Studios; Nat Turner: A Graphic Novel by Kyle Baker, published by Abrams ComicArts; and Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Damian Duffy (Adapter), Octavia E. Butler (Author), and John Jennings (Illustrator), published by Abrams ComicArts.