On June 11, Prof. Frank Bramlett from the University of Nebraska at Omaha visited SFS and gave a lecture with the title "Producing Alien, Satiric, and Everyday Identities in the Discourse of Web Comics". Deputy Dean Prof. Chen Yang chaired the lecture. Dean Prof. Huang Guowen and some 60 teachers and students in SFS attended.

   Prof. Bramlett made a multimodal analysis of popular web comics in the U.S.. With very simple language and some typical examples, he explained the alien, satiric and everyday images produced in popular web comics via elements like word choices, background settings, physical characteristics of figures in the comics, etc.

   The lecture aroused tremendous interestthe in the audience. The teachers and students present asked questions regarding the research methodologies, theoretical framework and the social functions of U.S. web comics, which Prof. Bramlett answered in detail.

   Frank Bramlett is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is also director of the TESOL Program and a faculty member in Black Studies, Women’s & Gender Studies and the MA program in Language Teaching. He is editor or co-editor of three books on comics studies and has written several book chapters and journal articles. He is on the editorial board of two scholarly journals and is program director of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF).

   This is Prof. Bramlett's second visit to SFS. The first visit was in March this year, when he came with Chair of the Department of English of UNO Prof. Tracy Bridgeford and others to discuss the cooperation between the Department of English at UNO and SFS.

(Report by Qin Jianhua  Pictures by Cen Haoxian)