Joseph “Rusty” Witek is holder of the Kathleen Johnson Chair in Humanities and Director of the Humanities Program at Stetson University. His teaching specialties include comics, popular culture, narrative fiction, literary theory, and the humanities. He has been teaching courses on comics since 1989.
Winner of the 1997 Hand Award for Scholarly Activity, Rusty is the author of Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (UP of Mississippi, 1989) and editor of Art Spiegelman: Conversations (2007), and has contributed essays to ImageTexT, International Journal of Comic Art, Journal of Popular Culture, The Comics Journal, and other journals and collections. He has served on the editorial boards of a number of academic journals devoted to comics.
Rusty’s term of office with the Discussion Group is from 2011 to MLA 2016.