Debanjana Nayek is a researcher and educator with expertise in Comics and Graphic Narrative Studies, Digital Humanities, and Visual Culture. Her doctoral research focuses on webcomics as an emergent and innovative form of digital storytelling. Drawing on Scott McCloud’s concept of the “infinite canvas,” her work critically examines how web-based graphic narratives transform authorship, visuality, and reader engagement within the decentralised aesthetics of cyberspace.
Her academic interests extend to New Media Studies, multimodal narrative theory, and South Asian visual cultures.
Debanjana has extensive experience teaching undergraduate literature at a constituent college under the University of Calcutta. Her teaching areas include Popular Literature and Culture, British Romantic literature, Modern European poetry and drama, and Narratology. She integrates digital and visual methodologies into her pedagogy, bridging classical literary frameworks with contemporary media analysis.
Her research, presented across various academic platforms, adopts a formalist lens to explore the structural and aesthetic mechanisms through which South Asian graphic texts articulate memory, environmental precarity, and postcolonial identity. Her work contributes to a transdisciplinary understanding of narrative by mapping the convergences between textuality, visual representation, and digital media within the context of global storytelling cultures.
Research Articles in peer reviewed journals:
“Shakuntala to Sanitary Panels: Women in Indian Graphic Narratives”, Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, Issue 6, April 2020.
“Subverting the Dominant Structure Through Graphic Narratives: From The Dissenting Printed Comics To The Subcultural Noise of Webcomics,”, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Taylor and Francis, 2021.
Nayek, Debanjana. "Comics, Cartoons and the Politics of Censorship in Digital India", Critical Collective, 2022.
"(Mis) Representations of The Transgender Identity: The Dominant Popular Narrative Culture Versus The Webcomics" in "Politics of Representation", Colloquium, Vol. 3 pp. 26-35, 2016
Book Chapters:
"Poiliticising The Body of The ‘Other’: India’s Gaze at Pakistan" in Beyond Partition: Film, Media and Representation in Post-Colonial South Asia (London: Routledge, 2021).
“Indian CyberFeminism: Digital Liberation or Selective Outrage?” in Contemporary Gender Formations in India (London: Routledge, 2024).
"Out of the Frame: The Third Space in Indian Graphic Narratives", in Comics, Methodologies & the Global South, Leuven University Press (forthcoming 2025).
Papers in Conferences:
“Panels of Revolution and Solidarity: Building resistance through graphic narratives”, “Comics and/as Resistance” at the University of Oxford (UK), 22 and 23 June, 2023
“What Comics Can Do in a Country of a Thousand Languages: Exploring the System of Indian Comics”, atUniversity of Cambridge, Joint Conference of the International Graphic Novel & Comics and the International Bande Dessinée Society, July 2023.
“Resisting and communicating through Art: Using Graphic narratives at
Protest sites and in Hashtag Activism” at University of Cambridge (Faculty of Education) in Joint Conference of the International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference
and the International Bande Dessinée Society, in June, 2021.
"Popping out of the pages of comic books: Cyber-feminism and Transmedia storytelling in Indian graphic narratives" a virtual symposium hosted jointly by representatives of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of North Texas, Harvard University, and Michigan State University, September 2020.
"Visual communication through Digital Comics" in the first Twitter conference of India, organised by DHARTI (Digital Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations), January 2020. You can find the paper here: https://twitter.com/i/events/1218839082760990720?s=20
“Reconstructing Mahabharata through ages: Creating a Storyworld from Ganesha to Grant Morrison & beyond” in Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels, Comics and Bande Dessineés, 20th Anniversary of the International Bande Dessinée Society and 10th Annual International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference, at Manchester Metropolitan University in June, 2019.
"Searching for the Gaming Unicorn in Indian visual narratives" in Games Lit 2019, organised by Presidency University, November 2019.
"Drawing A Subculture: The Dissenting Voices of The Indian Digital Graphic Narratives" in Transitions 8 – New Directions in Comics Studies Symposium at Birkbeck College, London, in November, 2018.
"Webcomics: An Aavant-Garde Way of Graphic Storytelling" in 'Doing Graphic Stories' at Jadavpur University, in January 2017.
"Graphic Novels, Web-Comics and the Encompassment of the Interdisciplinary ‘Sequential Art’ within English Literary Studies" in Young Researchers’ National Conference at The University of Burdwan, in December 2014.
Invited Lectures:
On "Gender and Graphic Narratives Pedagogy" at the Centre for Study of Contemporary Theory and Research (CSCTR), Adamas University, on 24th April, 2025.
On "Feminism in the Digital Age" at IDEAS, Office of Interdisciplinary Studies at O.P. Jindal Global University, on 18th May, 2024.
On "Women in Comics" in Comics in Bengal, held at Kolkata Centre for Creativity, on 2nd March, 2024.
"Identity and Resistance at the Margins of Art" in Resistance at the Margins: Selfhood, Identities, Communities, organised by Margins and Beyond, Presidency University, on 15th Sept., 2022.
On "Visual Analysis" in A Symposium on Research Methods in Social Sciences: Sharing Experiences from the Fields, organised by the Department of Political Science, Presidency University, on 4th-5th October, 2021.
On "Tintin and his adventures" in a Webinar on Popular Literature, Bhangar Mahavidyalaya, 28th Sept., 2021.
Presidency University Students Corner