About the Speakers

Grace D. Gipson, PhD is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at VCU, where she teaches courses on theories and foundations in African American Studies, Blackness in pop culture, and Black storytelling in television and film. As a proud HBCU graduate and Black future feminist/pop culture scholar, Dr. Gipson's area of research interest centers around Black pop culture, digital humanities, the intersections of race and gender in comic books and gaming, Afrofuturism, and race and new media. Grace's current book project “Reclaiming Her Time: Exploring Black Female Experiences and Identities in Comics and Graphic Novels'' seeks to explore the layered identities and experiences of various fictional Black female characters as personified in comic books and fandom culture and their relationship to real life situations. Dr. Gipson’s work on comics, graphic novels, and popular culture has been featured in various publications and book chapters through such outlets as CNN Entertainment, Richmond Times Dispatch, USA Today, NPR.org, and Black Perspectives. Outside the classroom, you can find Dr. Gipson collecting comic books and ticket stubs to the latest movies, co-hosting the video podcast Conversations with Beloved and Kindred, and contributing her personal and professional thoughts on pop culture via blackfuturefeminist.com.

Adin E. Lears, PhD is an Associate Professor of English at VCU. Her writing includes World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late-Medieval England (Cornell, 2020) as well as articles and essays on medieval embodiment, poetics, and gender in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, New Medieval Literatures, The Hedgehog Review, and other journals. At VCU she teaches courses in literature and medieval studies and is developing a course on literature, ethics, and care. 

Gabriela León-Pérez, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of the sociology of migration and medical sociology. Specifically, Gabriela’s research explores migration from Latin America to the US and how social and contextual factors shape the health and integration of Latinx immigrants and their children. Her research has been published in academic journals in the fields of sociology, public health, and demography. At VCU she teaches courses on immigration, racial and ethnic health disparities, and research methods.

Victoria Tucker, PhD, RN is a palliative care nurse at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Health System, an oral historian, and an interdisciplinary researcher. Her research explores the educational, professional, and personal lives of Black nurses in Virginia between the 1950s and 1980s. This history is sensitive to race, place, gender, and politics. Tucker utilizes oral histories as an impetus for restoring missing and fragmented archival records. Her broad goal is to impact spaces of learning and care by humanizing data and analyzing systems.