Margaret Galvan (she/her) is Associate 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 award-winning first book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s (2023, University of Minnesota Press) explores how publishing practices and archives have shaped understandings of the visual within feminist and queer activism. Her 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. This project has been been supported by fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and Andy Warhol Foundation. Concurrent with this research, she is building a personal collection of comics in social movements for teaching and research.

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 April 2025.