Candida Rifkind

Title: Professor
Phone: 204.786.9198
Office: 2A38
Email: c.rifkind@uwinnipeg.ca

Biography:

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 specializes in alternative comics and graphic narratives, Canadian popular and political writing, and feminist auto/biography theory.

In addition to numerous articles in comics studies and Canadian studies, Dr. Rifkind has co-edited two scholarly collections, Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage (Palgrave 2020, Honourable Mention for the Comics Studies Society 2020 Edited Book Prize) and Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2016, winner of the 2016 Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best book in English Canadian literary criticism).

She has also co-edited two special journal issues: “The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Canadian Comics” (Canadian Literature 249, 2022) and  “Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives” (a|b Auto|Biography Studies 35.2, 2020. 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. She recently collaborated with a team of UW and U of Manitoba researchers on Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography (hosted by the journal Jeunesse) and with a team of life writing scholars on the The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (2023).

Dr. Rifkind is currently co-writing a scholarly book with Dominic Davies titled Graphic Refuge: Mobility and Visuality in Refugee Comics (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, forthcoming 2024). She is Past President of the Comics Studies Society, serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of the journals Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, and iNKS, and was the co-orgainizer of 1BUW 2019. She is co-editor of the new Wilfrid Laurier University Press book series Crossing Lines: Transcultural/Transnational Comics Studies (with Barbara Postema and Nhora Serrano).

Website: http://www.candidarifkind.com/

Teaching Areas:
Graphic narratives and alternative comics; Canadian literatures and cultures; life writing.

Courses:

Research Interests:
Comics and Graphic Narratives; Canadian Literatures and Cultures; Life Writing/Autobiography; Screen and Cultural Studies.

Website: www.candidarifkind.com

Publications:

OPEN ACCESS RESOURCE: Indigenous Comics Annotated Bibliography

with Camille Callison and contributions by Niigaan James Sinclair, Sonya Ballantyne, Jay Odjick, Taylor Daigneault, and Amy Mazowita. “Introduction: Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography.” Jeunesse 11.1 (2019): 139-155.

with Taylor Daigneault, Amy Mazowita, and Camille Callison. “Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography.” Jeunesse 11.1 (2019): i-xxxvi.

BOOKS AND JOURNAL ISSUES

Co-authored with Sonja Boon, Laurie McNeill, and Julie Rak. The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada. Routledge Introductions to Canadian Literature. New York and London: Routledge. 2022.

Co-edited with Zachary Rondinelli. “The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Canadian Comics.” Special issue of Canadian Literature 249 (2022).

With Nima Naghibi and Eleanor Ty, Co-Eds. Special Issue of a/b Auto/Biography Studies on “Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives.” 35.2 (Spring 2020).

Co-edited with Dominic Davies.Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage. Palgrave Studies in Comics. Palgrave, 2020.

Co-edited with Linda Warley. Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives. Life Writing Series. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2016. Print.

Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

SELECTED ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

Comics Studies

“Immigration, Photography, and the Color Line in Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A Memoir in Black & White.” Immigrants and Comics Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis. Ed. Nhora Lucia Serrano. Routledge, 2021. 204-224.

“Migrant Detention Comics and the Aesthetic Technologies of Compassion.” Documenting Trauma: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories & Graphic Reportage in Comics. Eds. Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave, 2020. 297-316.

With Jessica Fontaine. “Indigeneity and Intermediality in Will I See?” Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in The Americas and Australasia. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. U of Mississippi P, 2020. 34-60.

“The Elements of a Life: Lauren Redniss’s Graphic Biography of Marie Curie.” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 10.1, Feb. 24, 2020. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.178

“Geneviève Castrée’s Unmade Beds: The Graphic Memoirs and Digital Afterlives of a Young Female Cartoonist.” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship. Sep. 18, 2018. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.128

 “Memory and Black Visuality in Ho Che Anderson's King.” Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives. Eds. Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2016. 177-206.

“The Biotopographies of Seth’s George Sprott (1894-1975).” Material Cultures. Eds. Jennifer Blair and Tom Allen. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015. 225-46.

"The Seeing Eye of Scientific Graphic Biography." Biography: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly. Special Issue on Auto/biography in Transit. Eds. Jason Breiter, Orley Lael Netzer, Julie Rak, Lucinda Rasmussen. 38.1 (Winter 2015): 1-22.

“Design and Disappearance: Visual Nostalgias and the Canadian Company Town.” Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory. Eds. Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 2014. 68-93. Book review here.

Canadian Literature

"Norman Bethune and the Contested Spaces of Canadian Public Memory." Contested Spaces: Counter-Narratives and Culture from Below. Eds. Roxanne Rimstead and Domenic A. Beneventi. University of Toronto Press, 2019. 212-240.

“The Returning Reader: Canadian Serial Fiction and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna.” Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920-1960. Eds. Mary Grover and Erica Brown. London: Palgrave, 2012. 171-86.

“When Mounties were Modern Kitsch: The Serial Seductions of Renfrew of the Mounted.” English Studies in Canada 37.3-4 (2011): 123-46. Winner of the F.E.L. Priestley Prize, which recognizes and acknowledges the best essay published in English Studies in Canada over the past year.

 “Technologies of the Podium: Montreal Massacre Poetry and the Feminist Counterpublic.” Open Letter. Special issue on Poetics and Public Culture. Eds. Lily Cho and Melina Baum-Singer. 12.8 (Spring 2006): 46-59.

“Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the Sentimental Poetry of Edna Jaques.” Journal of Canadian Studies 39.1 (Winter 2005): 90-114.

Research Methods & Pedagogy

“Research Methods for Studying Graphic Biography.” Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies. Eds. Ashley Barnwell and Kate Douglas. Routledge, 2019. 68-75.

“The Work of Teaching Women’s Auto/Bio Comics.” a/b: Auto/biography Studies 33:3 (2018): 725-734. DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2018.1499525.

“Graphic Narratives.” What’s Next? The Futures of Auto|Biography Studies. Spec. issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. Eds. Emily Hipchen and Ricia Anne Chansky. 32.2 (2017): 187-90.

“Graphic Life Narratives and Teaching the Art of Failure.” Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives. Spec. issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. Eds. Laurie McNeill and Kate Douglas. 32.1 (2017). 104-7. Reprint: Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives, Routledge, 2017.