Rate My Professor Jared Gardner

Jared Gardner is the Joseph V. Denney Designated Professor of English at The Ohio State University, where he has served on the faculty since 1999. He holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, awarded in 1994, and a BA from Amherst College, awarded in 1987. Gardner teaches courses on American literature, film, popular culture, comics, environmental humanities, medical humanities, and science fiction. He also serves as Secretary of the University Senate and as director of the Popular Culture Studies program. Gardner frequently collaborates with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, where he has curated exhibitions including Drawing Blood: Comic & Medicine and, with Elizabeth Hewitt, Powerlines: Comics & the Environment.

His research focuses on comics studies, periodical studies, American film history, popular culture history, print and media history, medical humanities, and environmental humanities. Selected publications include the edited volume Will Eisner's A Contract with God and Other Stories of Dropsie Avenue: A Norton Critical Edition (W.W. Norton, 2022), Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (Stanford University Press, 2012), The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2012), and Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Gardner is a frequent collaborator on projects involving comics and narrative across media.