Briana Martino

Associate Professor and Department Chair

Education

  • B.S., Clinical Psychology, Tufts University, summa cum laude
  • B.A. Certificate, Integrated Media, Simmons University
  • M.A., Cultural Studies, Stony Brook University
  • M.A. Certificate, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Stony Brook University
  • Ph.D., Cultural Studies, Stony Brook University

About Me

Dr. Briana Martino is Associate Professor and Chair of Communications, co-director of Cinema and Media Studies, and affiliated faculty in Race, Gender, and Culture. They completed their B.S. in Clinical Psychology with emphases in Neuroscience and Literature at Tufts University and held a Stanley Fellowship at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Martino is also an alum of Simmons' Communications Department with a focus on Integrated Media. They earned their doctoral degree in Cultural Studies from the Graduate Program in Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University with qualifying exams in feminist cultural studies, post-war psychiatric practice, documenting mental illness, and institutional analysis via Félix Guattari’s concept/practice of transversality. Their doctoral dissertation, The Living Inside: Listening to Madness with Félix Guattari, maps the politico-therapeutics of mad organizing.

Martino's current research explores threads between graphic medicine, which is the conjuncture of comics with clinical medicine and healthcare, as well as the experience or event of illness, trauma, and disability, and mad/disability justice, which is both a theoretical framework and a practice of action and care that centers multiply marginalized mad and disabled people. Their work on graphic medicine as feminist pedagogy appears in MAI: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture, and their work on graphic medicine’s shared genealogies with mutual aid is forthcoming in The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Their current book length project Keywords/images in Graphic Medicine, co-edited with Lisa Diedrich, offers a portal to the concepts, methods, and politics of the field of graphic medicine, bringing together scholars, health professionals, patients, and artists to produce a transdisciplinary verbal/visual lexicon.

What I Teach

  • COMM 121 Visual Communications
  • COMM 344 Storytelling
  • COMM 390 Studio 5
  • BOS 101 Social Movements and the University
  • ENG 195 Art of Film
  • ENG 221 Critical Lens: Intro to Film and Media Theory
  • WGST 111 Intro to LGBTQ Studies
  • WGST 353 Mad/ness
  • CHL 428 The Graphic Novel

Research/Creative Activities

Graphic Medicine; Mad Studies; Visual Cultural Studies; Queer Feminist Science and Disability Studies