Candida Rifkind

Biography

Candida Rifkind has an Honours BA from Dalhousie University (Halifax), an MA from Concordia University (Montreal), and a PhD from York University (Toronto). She specializes in alternative comics and graphic narratives, Canadian popular and political writing, and life writing and auto/biography theory. Her co-edited scholarly collection, Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), won the 2016 Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best book in English Canadian literary criticism. Her scholarly monograph, Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2009), received the 2009 Ann Saddlemyer Award for the best book published on a Canadian theatre topic. Recent and forthcoming publications include articles on: the public memorialization of Norman Bethune; photography and Civil Rights in Lisa Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White, Mountie serial fiction and kitsch; the biotopographies of Seth’s “picture novella” George Sprott; metabiography and black visuality in Ho Che Anderson’s comics biography King; scientific graphic biographies of Robert Oppenheimer; and visual nostalgias of the Canadian company town. She is currently writing a book about transnational graphic biographies with the support of a three-year Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, researching migrant and refugee comics, and coordinating a bibliographic project on Indigenous comics. She is Second Vice President of the Comics Studies Society 2017-18 (President Elect 2019-20), serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal INKS, the Advisory Board of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics/La Sociéte canadienne pour l’étude de la bande dessinée, and regularly reviews comics and graphic narratives for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Research Interest

Graphic narratives and alternative comics; Canadian literature and culture; life writing.