Nicholas Derda

Nick Derda is a PhD candidate where he is currently completing his dissertation entitled, Visualizing Queer Care: Comics and Counterpublic Health in the Age of AIDS, which examines how activists, artists, and community-based organizations used comics to shape the course of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States. Comics were used to spread vital information about the epidemic and to help vulnerable communities imagine a collective future at a moment when the crisis felt hopeless. They functioned as instructional guides about safer sex and harm reduction; as forums to develop oppositional meanings about illness and sexual identity; and more recently as archives for HIV/AIDS social histories. I argue that these individuals and collectives used comics to promote a vision of queer counterpublic health, or a mode of public health that was based on the needs and practices of marginalized people rather than the dictates of public morality. To document this visual history, I use interviews, archival investigations, and visual analysis to study how the use of comics shifted as HIV/AIDS transformed into a chronic, manageable condition in the twenty-first century.

Nick has received financial support for his research from USC’s Center for Science, Technology, and Public Life, the USC Graduate School, and the Comics Studies Society. He has presented his research at regional and national conferences, including the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch, and the Comics Studies Society, and to research staff at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. His writing is forthcoming in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society and American Periodicals. He is also a contributing writer for Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. Prior to graduate school, he worked for several years with nonprofit organizations in Washington, D.C.  providing direct services to resilient communities.  

• M.A. Gender Studies, George Washington University, 5/2018
• BA Spanish, Valparaiso University, 5/2012