Dr. Qiana Whitted

Dr. Qiana Whitted is an Eisner Award-winning scholar, professor, editor, and one of the foremost academics working at the intersection of comics studies and African American literature. She is a Professor of English and Director of African American Studies at the University of South Carolina, where she has taught comics since 2005 and has been a faculty member since 2003.

Whitted's monograph EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (Rutgers University Press, 2019) won the 2020 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work — the most prestigious prize in comics studies. The book examines how EC Comics's socially conscious "preachie" stories grappled with civil rights, antisemitism, and racial prejudice in 1950s America. Her edited collection Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics (Rutgers University Press, 2023) won the Comics Studies Society Edited Book Prize and received an Eisner Award honorable mention.

Whitted chaired the International Comic Arts Forum from 2017 to 2023, edits Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, and has delivered the Penn State Humanities Institute Annual Lecture and keynotes at institutions worldwide. In 2022 she won the University of South Carolina's Russell Research Award for the Humanities and Social Sciences — the most prestigious research prize at the university. She serves as Co-Program Director of Atlantic Comic Con.