Daily Inspiration: Meet Julian Chambliss

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Julian Chambliss.

Hi Julian, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m a lifelong comic book fan and history nerd. As a high school kid, I was lucky enough to participate in the Upward Bound program, which helped me develop my skills as a student and got me into college.

While I struggled to find a major, I hit upon History partly because I got chosen to participate in the Ronald E. McNair Program. That program encouraged students from disadvantaged backgrounds to consider graduate study. I finished my Ph.D. in United States History and began teaching. While developing a modern history course, I used comic books as a primary source to discuss U.S. culture.

I developed courses using digital tools to explore popular culture and historic communities and curated public exhibitions examining communities of color, popular culture, and Afrofuturism. At Michigan State, my work on comics, digital humanities, and Afrofuturism is central to my activities. I recently completed a documentary on Afrofuturism called “Afrofantastic: The Transformative World of Afrofuturism,” available through pbs.org.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I’m a first-generation college student, so I had to navigate and understand the rules and regulations of financial aid. My family supported this, but the help of Upward Bound counselors made all the difference. Finding jobs on campus and working in the summer were some things I needed to figure out. I benefitted from offices on campus that supported low-income students. They gave me the space to concentrate on classes and do well.

As a professor, I work hard to engage my students and the community as much as possible. People tend to describe me as “a public intellectual,” but I think of my work as answering questions about history, community, and culture we all think about. My concerns and experience growing up inspire my approach to my work.

Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
In my work, I seek to foster dialogue that calls attention to overlooked groups and voices often misunderstood. My background as a historian has allowed me to focus on communities in real and imagined spaces.

This means I write about fantastic comic book characters and historical communities to try to understand how the values, beliefs, and actions in both spaces tell us something about social, political, and economic transformations in the United States.

I’ve curated exhibitions using comics to explore social justice, created public history exhibitions documenting historic black communities, and created comics highlighting historical people and events.

What makes you happy?
I feel tremendous when I can support the community. Much of my work involves trying to help make things that seem complicated clearer for the public to understand. Popular culture’s central role in public debates and clashes directly results from how we, as a collective society, are growing and changing.

The best impact of education is giving people the tools to understand how the world is the way it is. Education can build our capacity to navigate a changing world, and it bolsters the tools we have to find solutions.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.afrofantastic.com
• Instagram: @blackimaginary
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Afrofantastic/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-chambliss-2039922/
• Twitter: @JulianChambliss
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianChambliss

Image Credits
MSU Photography Service and Julian Chambliss