Martin Lund's Blog

I was recently interviewed by political scientist and historian Lilly Goren for the New Books Network, about Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics.

This week, all the Is have finally been crossed and the Ts all dotted, meaning that this fall semester Malmö University will be offering a new course: In the course, we will be looking at how comics can be used to reinforce, reject, reconstruct, or manufacture meaning in relation to social formations and structures that … Continue reading New Course on Religion and Comics →

Just got the news it's official! Come March I'll be teaching a short, non-credit course on New York City and comics at the Gotham Center for New York City History, at CUNY's Graduate Center, where I spent three years doing research on the topic. (I'll be doing it online, of course.) Description follows below. Cover … Continue reading New Course on NYC and Comics →

Simply put, some "it" doesn't proactively catch our eye but, instead, our eye catches it!Russell T. McCutcheon, "Religion" in Theory and Practice (p. 9) Yesterday I participated in a "brown bag lunch" event (over Zoom) with some urban studies scholars. Through the usual twists and turns of academia, I had been invited to talk a … Continue reading Isn’t it Interesting? On Choosing Texts →

I always find it interesting to see pundits evoke history in ways that lose touch with the past and present alike. It’s a fairly common form of rhetoric that speaks volumes through omission, and it's fertile ground for myth-making. In an opinion piece from August 28th, after having seen a Spider-Man figure on a skateboard … Continue reading On Boycotting Toys: Public “Nerd Rage” and a Mythology of Superheroic Authenticity →

'The work of people who don't have the luxury of complaining about Zoom fatigue keep us in that privileged place. And these are people who still don't have many choices beyond "work a dangerous job or starve on the street."'

The critical study of whiteness is a rapidly growing field, but it still lacks in good introduction volumes. Much scholarship is rather specialized or focused on one group or era or phenomenon. Although ten years old, Painter’s book stands as an exception, providing an eminently readable introduction to the history of whiteness in the USAmerican context; it shouldn’t be the last book anyone reads on the subject, but it is a great first one for those hoping to learn more about how we got to where...

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Recently, when I've had some time free of other obligations, I have been working on a new book about the things we call superheroes and the ways we fill that label with meaning.

It is in this context that Claremont also started looking – or perhaps glancing is the better word choice – towards the US South. In the years before he took over writing X-Men and while he was shaping it into the juggernaut it fast became, the South was also making itself known in new ways on the US arena. In a process that has been described as a “reddening” of America, playing on the term “redneck,” the image of the South started to change and the South became a more frequent nonpejorative pr...