Academic Bio

My name is Elk Paauw (he/him), and I am a comics artist and PhD candidate at the University of Western Ontario in Theory and Criticism, where my thesis research is a comic on trans psychoanalysis focusing on Lacan. I adjunct at Western teaching Intro to Trans Studies (200-level Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies) and Animation/Anime (200-level Film Studies). I received my master's degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (read thesis-comic at 4dtime.space). I have research forthcoming in a Handbook of Trans Cinema on anime, an article in a Springer Handbook on Disability and Comics, and an article in a volume on Norm-critical Perspectives in Comics. I also have graphic essays forthcoming in a Palgrave Handbook on comics life writing and on phenomenology and ambient music for the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation. I also helped organize a conference on Walter Benjamin in 2024, and have presented work at the Comics Studies Society Conference (2021, 2025), International Comics Art Forum (2021, 2025), Thinking Trans / Trans Thinking (2022). I was also awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism in 2023, and in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020.