Derek Parker Royal

Derek Parker Royal is a Clinical Associate Professor in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. His areas of research include comics studies, contemporary literature, and narrative theory. He is the general editor of the new Bloomsbury Comics Studies Series, from Bloomsbury Academic, and he is the founder and former executive editor of the journal, Philip Roth Studies. His books include Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (Praeger, 2005), Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (Atlante, 2011, co-authored with Patrick Badonnel and Daniel Royot), Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative (Purdue University Press, 2011), and the upcoming Visualizing Jewish Narrative: Essays on Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). He has guest edited eight different special issues of scholarly journals, covering topics such as multi-ethnic comics, superheroes and gender, politics and comics, Woody Allen’s post-1990 films, and contemporary Jewish narrative. His essays on comics, film, and American literature have appeared in a variety of edited book collections and scholarly journals, including College Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, ImageTexT, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, International Journal of Comic Art, Post Script, MELUS, Critique, Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, The Mark Twain Annual, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Midwest Quarterly, Modern Jewish Studies/Yiddish, Shofar, and Studies in American Jewish Literature. He is currently working on two book projects for the University Press of Mississippi, including The Hernandez Brothers: Conversations (part of its Conversation with Comics Artists Series) and Coloring America, a collection of essays on post-1980s American multi-ethnic comics.