Candida Rifkind

Candida Rifkind has a BA (Hon.) in English from Dalhousie University (Halifax, NS), an MA in English from Concordia University (Montreal, PQ), and a PhD in English from York University (Toronto, ON). She specializes in alternative comics and graphic narratives, Canadian popular and political writing, and feminist auto/biography theory.

In addition to numerous articles in comics studies and Canadian studies, Dr. Rifkind has co-edited two scholarly collections, Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage (Palgrave 2020, Honourable Mention for the Comics Studies Society 2020 Edited Book Prize) and Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2016, winner of the 2016 Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best book in English Canadian literary criticism).

She has also co-edited two special journal issues: “The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Canadian Comics” (Canadian Literature 249, 2022) and “Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives” (a|b Auto|Biography Studies 35.2, 2020. Her scholarly monograph, Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature and the 1930s Canadian Left (University of Toronto Press, 2009), received the 2009 Ann Saddlemyer Award for the best book published on a Canadian theatre topic. She recently collaborated with a team of UW and U of Manitoba researchers on Indigenous Comics and Graphic Novels: An Annotated Bibliography (hosted by the journal Jeunesse) and with a team of life writing scholars on the The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (2023).

Dr. Rifkind is currently co-writing a scholarly book with Dominic Davies titled Graphic Refuge: Mobility and Visuality in Refugee Comics (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, forthcoming 2024). She is Past President of the Comics Studies Society, serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of the journals Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, and iNKS, and was the co-orgainizer of 1BUW 2019. She is co-editor of the new Wilfrid Laurier University Press book series Crossing Lines: Transcultural/Transnational Comics Studies (with Barbara Postema and Nhora Serrano).