Working with Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s papers in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin (Photo by Alberto Gonzalez).

Margaret Galvan (she/her) is Assistant Professor of visual rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. In her research, she examines how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements of the 1970s-1990s, recovering artists and their networks. (Visit these links to learn more about her book projects, her published writing, and her teaching.)

Her first book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s (2023), is out now with University of Minnesota Press‘s Manifold Scholarship Series. This project explores how publishing practices and archives have shaped understandings of the visual within feminist and queer activism. Her grant-funded and award-winning research spans over a dozen archives where she analyzes comics, captioned photographs, drawings, transparencies, advertisements, and other image-text media produced by eight women: Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson, Roberta Gregory, Lee Marrs, Alison Bechdel, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Nan Goldin.

Her second book project, Comics in Movement, examines how LGBTQ cartoonists built community to support their comics in the 1980s and 1990s, formulating networks that still provide support today amidst a now booming publishing landscape. In 2021-2022, she was researching this project as the Distinguished Junior External Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She is also a 2021-2023 Junior Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB) at Rare Book School (RBS) and is applying the advanced training in analyzing rare books to develop this project, as well. Concurrent with this research, she is building a personal collection of comics in social movements for teaching and research.

Intersecting her interest in infrastructures of print culture, she has devoted attention to the development of free and open-source academic platforms. She has done that work as a Coordinator of Education and Support for OpenCUNY (2010-2016), Senior Instructional Technology Fellow at Macaulay Honors College (2011-2017), and as part of the development team of the CUNY Academic Commons (2016-2017).

She received her PhD in English with a film studies certificate candidate at The Graduate Center, City University of New York where her completed dissertation was awarded the Monette Prize for the Best Dissertation in Lesbian/Gay Studies.

If you are interested in inviting Margaret to speak at your event, read more here.

Last updated March 2024.