Dr John Miers

About

I am a cartoonist, illustrator, teacher and researcher. My primary interest is in narrative illustration, particularly sequential forms such as comics. My comics work is represented in Tate Publishing's survey of the artform Comics Art, and I have been invited to present it at events across the UK and in Amsterdam and Chicago. My wider practice spans a variety of contexts including branding and promotional design and illustration in the editorial and publishing sectors, including work for The Guardian, Reader's Digest, The Idler, Foyles, Paragraph Publishing and Centaur Media. 

My research has been published in British and European peer-reviewed journals and volumes. I am an active member of the comics studies community. I sit on the organising committee of the Transitions symposium (Birkbeck, University of London) and am a founder member of the UAL Comics Research Hub (CorH!).

In addition to my primary role as senior lecturer in illustration at KSA, I am a visiting lecturer at University of the Arts London and the Royal College of Art, and external examiner for BA Cartoon and Comic Art at Staffordshire University and BA Comics and Graphic Novels at Teesside University

With Maggie Gray and Nick White, I co-run the Kingston School of Art Comic Club.

Academic responsibilities

Senior Lecturer in Illustration and Critical and Historical Studies

Qualifications

  • 2011-2018: PhD Graphic Communication, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
  • 2003-4: Postgraduate Diploma Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London
  • 1997-2001: BA Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London

Teaching and learning

Qualifications and expertise

  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, November 2020
  • Best Postgraduate Teacher, Union of Kingston Students Academic Impact Awards 2020
  • 2003-4: Certificate in post-compulsory education, University of Westminster

Undergraduate courses taught

Postgraduate courses taught

Research

My approach to the creation and analysis of graphic communication is guided by my interest is how drawing style creates narrative meanings by guiding audiences' expectations regarding genre, mood and character. I explored this from a theoretical perspective in my PhD (Visual Metaphor and Drawn Narratives, Central Saint Martins, 2017), which developed a synthesis between philosophical understandings of depiction and visual metaphor.

More recently I have applied this approach in the field of Graphic Medicine: my Researcher in the Archives residency at London College of Communication resulted in the production of an autobiographical comic book in which I adopted the styles of other artists in order to express and process aspects of living with multiple sclerosis. This publication is now held in the Wellcome Collection, the UK's leading institution exploring the connections between art and health, and was named as "Best One-Shot" in the 2020 Broken Frontier awards. I have continued to publish new autobiographical comics drawing on the archival research conducted during the residency, as well as broadening the scope of this work in comics that explore the contribution graphic medicine can make to disability studies and public health discourse.

I am a passionate advocate of creative practice as a research method and form of dissemination; my most recent peer-reviewed articles have been in comics form, and my most recent written outputs include original drawings created as demonstrations of their theoretical arguments.

I welcome applications for PhD or MA by Research study in comics studies, metaphor studies, illustration history, practice and theory, and the intersection of healthcare with visual arts and design.

Research student supervision

Publications

Number of items: 17.

Article

Miers, John, Chessum, Thierry and Davies, Paul F. (2022) Triangulation (Being the record of a discussion of comics theory conducted on 2nd May 2018, transcribed into words and then comics in the period since.). Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 13(1), pp. 110-127. ISSN (print) 2150-4857

Miers, John (2021) Conflict or Compromise? Biography, ISSN (print) 0162-4962 (In Press)

Wysocki, Lydia, Jackson, Mark, Miers, John, Webster, Jane and Coxon, Brittany (2019) Making the invisible visible : hyperlinked webcomics as alternative points of entry to the digitised Gertrude Bell Archive. International Journal of Heritage Studies, ISSN (print) 1352-7258

Miers, John (2015) Depiction and demarcation in comics : towards an account of the medium as a drawing practice. Studies in Comics, 6(1), pp. 145-156. ISSN (print) 2040-3232

Book Section

Miers, John (2022) Media. In: La Cour, Erin , Grennan, Simon and Spanjers, Rik, (eds.) Key terms in comics studies. Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 190-191. (Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels) ISSN (print) 2634-6370 ISBN 9783030749736

Miers, John (2022) Mediation. In: La Cour, Erin , Grennan, Simon and Spanjers, Rik, (eds.) Key terms in comics studies. Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 192-192. (Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels) ISSN (print) 2634-6370 ISBN 9783030749736

Miers, John (2022) Metaphor. In: La Cour, Erin , Grennan, Simon and Spanjers, Rik, (eds.) Key terms in comics studies. Cham. Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 196-197. (Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels) ISSN (print) 2634-6370 ISBN 9783030749736

Miers, John (2022) Psychologies of perception : stories of depiction. In: Gray, Maggie and Horton, Ian, (eds.) Seeing comics through art history : alternative approaches to the form. Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 75-95. (Palgrave studies in comics and graphic novels) ISSN (print) 2634-6370 ISBN 9783030935061

Miers, John (2022) Representation. In: La Cour, Erin , Grennan, Simon and Spanjers, Rik, (eds.) Key terms in comics studies. Cham. Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 274-275. (Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels) ISSN (print) 2634-6370 ISBN 9783030749736

Harrington, Bill, Rumeu, Jaume [Artist], Round, Julia [Writer of accompanying material], D'Arcy, Geraint [Writer of accompanying material], Miers, John [Writer of accompanying material], Horton, Ian [Writer of accompanying material] and Pursall, Dona [Writer of accompanying material] (2021) Stylistic analysis, or “sweating the small stuff”. In: ., ., (ed.) Misty Presents : the Jaume Rumeu Collection. Oxford, U.K. : Rebellion. pp. 120-122. (Misty, (5)) ISBN 9781781089378

Miers, John (2019) Picturing national and personal acts of violence : modes of depiction in Barefoot Gen. In: Mickwitz, Nina , Horton, Ian and Hague, Ian, (eds.) Representing Acts of Violence in Comics. Abingdon, U.K. and New York, U.S. : Routledge. pp. 19-34. ISBN 9781138484535

Miers, John (2017) Bacon and the cartoonist : the emergence of the figure through two opposing diagrams. In: de Assis, Paulo and Giudici, Paolo, (eds.) The dark precursor : Deleuze and artistic research. Leuven, Belgium : Leuven University Press. pp. 375-385. 2 ISBN 9789462701182

Miers, John and Grennan, Simon (2015) Dispossession: time, motion and depictive regimes. In: Grennan, Simon and Grove, Lawrence, (eds.) Transforming Anthony Trollope. Leuven, Belgium : Leuven University Press. pp. 33-54. ISBN 9789462700413

Conference or Workshop Item

Lewis, Makayla, Sturdee, Miriam, Miers, John, Davis, Josh Urban and Hoang, Thuong (2022) Exploring AltNarrative in HCI imagery and comics. In: CHI 2022: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems; 30 Apr - 05 May 2022, New Orleans, U.S.. (Unpublished)

Sturdee, Miriam, Lewis, Makayla, Gamboa, Mafalda, Hoang, Thuong N., Miers, John, Šmorgun, Ilja, Jain, Pranjal, Strohmayer, Angelika, Alaoui, Sarah Fdili and Wodtke, Christina R. (2022) The state of the (CHI)Art. In: CHI 2022: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems; 30 Apr - 05 May 2022, New Orleans, U.S.. (Unpublished)

Horton, Ian and Miers, John (2021) Issues of inclusion when archiving and displaying mini-comics from the Les Coleman Collection. In: Bandes dessinées hors-champs = Comics on the Outside; 2 - 4 Jun 2021, Université libre de Bruxelles (held online). (Unpublished)

Miers, John (2018) If epilepsy is a dragon, multiple sclerosis is a…. In: Drawing Yourself In and Out of It : The 2nd International Amsterdam Comics Conference; 15 - 17 Nov 2018, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (Unpublished)

This list was generated on Tue Oct 8 07:08:04 2024 BST.

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