At the intersection of American popular culture, literature, and history you may find public intellectual Ramzi Fawaz. He stands at the roundabout helping travelers navigate the chaos and noise churning around them. As a full Professor of English at UW-Madison, Fawaz’s job is to broaden his students’ understanding of how any variety of contemporary media engages difference and creates new possibilities of social transformation. Spend a moment with his work, and you will never look at the comic book you just read, or your favorite video game, or any of your mass media guilty pleasures, in the same way.

Fawaz, who has lived in Madison for 12 years, began his academic trajectory at the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate in literature. As he recalls it, he was a sophomore when he “accidentally discovered” the field of American Cultural Studies in the form of Professor Kathleen Moran’s course on the 1980s. It “boggled his mind.” Every week they watched a movie in class and deconstructed it through a postmodernist lens. Familiar films such as 9 to 5, Heathers, and Back to the Future had new meaning. He came out to his family because of Thelma & Louise (long story for another time, but you can read the first 10 pages of Queer Forms if you are curious).

Comic books saved his life 

Prior to Professor Moran’s class, Fawaz had not realized that one could study cinema, visual culture, and literature in tandem with subjects such as politics, everyday life, and sociology. Professor Moran noticed Fawaz’s gift for thinking about media in this interdisciplinary way, and she encouraged him to double major in English and American Studies.

The following year, he became a teaching assistant to Professor Moran for a class she taught on consumer society. This meant that he began earning money for professorial duties as an undergraduate. He had never dreamed that he could make a living from something he loved so much. Professor Moran even invited him to lecture to the class about comics and consumerism. Comic books had “saved his life” as a teenager and now he was gaining a new and much deeper appreciation for their profound cultural significance. He focused his first lecture on an X-Men comic called “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” an epic tragedy about a superhero who becomes a god, consumes an entire star in another universe, and then kills a billion people on another planet. The saga came out during the energy crisis of the 1970s, so Fawaz analyzed the story through that context. At the end of the lecture, he says, Professor Moran looked at him and said, “This is what you should be doing for a living.” He felt it, too.

Making a living doing what he loves 

After his junior year, he was “off to the races.” He won a SURF, the Yale Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program for under-represented students who aspire to attain doctoral degrees. He was paid to live on Yale’s campus in New Haven while researching and writing about superhero teens and queer families. He had full access to all the resources of Yale University, and was mentored by queer art historian, Jonathan D. Katz (who is now at Penn in the Art History Department).

It was through SURF that Fawaz started to ask himself the question that would propel his academic pursuits for many years: “How was it that as a 13-year-old, bullied, gay, Lebanese-American immigrant, who was constantly feeling the crushing weight of homophobia, reading comic books made him feel like he belonged in the world?” He theorized that superhero comic books, by reinterpreting the superhero from the white, masculine figure of national power dominant in the prewar period to the mutant outcast of the postwar period, reflected the ideals of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, inclusion, and democratic life. Fawaz started to see how comic books celebrate found families and marginalized identities and use fantasy to imagine more equitable social and political possibilities.

Superheroes as cultural transformers 

Like a superhero on a mission, Fawaz blasted through graduate school in American Studies at George Washington University. His PhD dissertation became the basis for his first book, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016). That work challenged conventional readings of superhero comics by revealing their importance as cultural transformers who create alliances across differences. He developed the theory of “Queer Mutanity”:

I pointed out that the notion of a ‘universal humanity’ so central to liberal politics in the post-WWII period had failed to include vast swathes of the human population still seen as marginal or outcast to a predominantly white Western worldview. I suggested that comics like the X-Men and the Fantastic Four responded to this failure by presenting the idea of a “queer mutanity.” This concept suggested that we are all bound together not by our common humanity but by our distinctiveness, the countless ways we each seemingly fail to live up to an idealized version of humankind.

Fawaz prides himself on communicating in an accessible and grounded way, and indeed, New Mutants had a crossover audience of both ivory tower academics and general readers. In fact, one of the most significant contributions of that text has been its role in building bridges and sparking public conversations about queerness, social justice, and popular culture. It garnered, for Fawaz, the prestigious ASAP Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Fellowship Award, and honorable mention for the Laura Romero First Book Prize of the American Studies Association.

Though he initially made his name through analysis of postwar comics, Fawaz’s scholarship now follows the paths of his current pop culture interests. He returns to comics regularly, but he doesn’t dwell on them:

I don’t like the idea that people in the humanities get so boxed in to specific objects, to specific fields; they are supposed to be asking big questions. I often have to say ‘no’ to people who write me wanting to interview me about comic books. I’m like, ‘Girl, that was 12 years ago, like I have moved on.’ I love comics. They are great. I return to the realm of superheroes quite often—a chapter of my new book is about the Spider-Verse films as psychedelic cultural products—but let other people have their say. You’ve heard enough from me.

Asking the big questions 

Fawaz’s wide-ranging interests include television, children’s literature, and youth-oriented cultural products. “I have really big questions about the world,” he explains. “I’m interested in how people use the imagination to make social and political change creatively.” As a columnist for Film Quarterly, he writes about a new movie every three months. His next article for them will be about the 2024 film, The Wild Robot, based on the 2016 children’s book by Peter Brown.

In his second book, Fawaz turned to the queer and feminist 70s. Queer Forms (NYU Press, 2022) explores how pop culture products, from children’s picture books to performance art, have shaped queer social movements and political consciousness since the 1960s. The work exemplifies Fawaz’s commitment to examining how fantasy can be used as a vehicle of political agency—and, ultimately, social evolution—when marginalized communities use popular culture to imagine and create change. “The through line of all the books is this question about how you cultivate the faculty of the imagination to do real material work in the world.”

Fawaz’s latest project is called Literary Theory on Acid: Reading for Diversity in the Psychedelic Era. The book examines the various ways that popular culture reflects the contemporary psychedelic renaissance, that is, the project of using and studying psychoactive medicines to treat a variety of forms of mental distress. Over the last 20 years, Fawaz argues, American popular culture has become extremely psychedelic both aesthetically and creatively. Such psychedelic forms of pop culture are visually arresting, expansive, and filled with special effects that invoke in their audiences “heightened states of emotional response, precisely to break them out of habituated patterns of psychological distress.”

Examples include films like Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Spider-Verse films, and the television series Undone, in which traveling across time and space heals the traumas of the main character’s Latine past. Fawaz shows how each of these cultural texts is playing on a distinct aspect of psychedelic experience but without the consumer having to actually take drugs to feel the liberatory benefits.

The importance of the humanities 

“Popular culture is ahead of the game,” he says. It acknowledges that we are going through a period of mental distress and tries to innovate to alter our senses. At the root, the deeper argument Fawaz is making in his current work is about the importance of the humanities. Where psychedelic therapy attempts to induce transformation through the use of mind-altering drugs, the humanities uses art and literature to achieve the same effect. “The humanities are one of the biggest defenses of young people’s mental well-being in our country. They go to humanities to study the multi-dimensional nature of human creativity and imagination,” he says.

The humanities also develop young people’s ability to form their own opinions and make political judgements about the world in a way that validates their worldview. He adds, “The humanities is where people go to feel more human. The denigration of the humanities ignores this crucial fact, and I find it really ironic that people are very easily convinced to do psychedelic therapy, but they are not easily convinced that the humanities matter.” In the book he is currently writing, Fawaz creates a conversation between psychedelic medicine and humanistic thought, and he shows how they can learn something from each other.

Helping students process and understand the world around them

In his teaching at UW-Madison, Fawaz brings the same passionate engagement with popular culture and critical theory that characterizes his scholarship. Recently, after returning from sabbatical feeling reinvigorated, he designed courses about “Psychedelic Imaginaries” and “Arab-American Literature and Popular Culture.” Students are hungry for classes that help them process and understand the world around them and the times in which they live. Fawaz makes complex theoretical concepts accessible while challenging students to think more deeply about the media and ideologies they are consuming.

Central to Fawaz’s work is the belief that popular culture matters—not just as entertainment, but as the scene of collective struggle where people argue over what should be the shared values of our society. As our country engages in a mammoth game of political and cultural tug-of-war, and the role of popular media continues to be debated, Fawaz’s scholarship is increasingly relevant. His work provides essential tools for understanding how popular culture can either reinforce or challenge social norms around gender, sexuality, and identity.

As both a scholar and educator, Fawaz, who currently holds a Romnes faculty fellowship for advanced research in the humanities, continues to demonstrate the vital importance of studying popular culture through a feminist and queer lens. His work reminds us that the stories we are drawn to—whether in comic books, movies, or other media—have the power to shape how we understand ourselves, imagine possible futures, and change the world.

Karin Wolf is an arts administrator, freelance arts writer, and consultant. She likes to get deep and try to understand complex art, people, and ideas. Writing about them is her favorite way to do so. She has a M.S. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and undergraduate degrees in History, History of Cultures, and Afro-American History.