JULIA ROUND

Julia Round (MA, PhD) is an award-winning writer and scholar. She is one of the founders and editors of the academic journal Studies in Comics (Intellect Books) and of the book series Encapsulations: Critical Comics Studies (University of Nebraska Press). She is Associate Professor of English and Comics Studies in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University, UK, and Head of BU's Narrative, Culture and Community Research Centre. Julia also co-organises the annual International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference, now in its sixteenth year (Brussels and online, June/July 2025).

 

Julia's research examines Gothic, comics, and children's literature, and she has published widely in these areas and spoken at lots of international conferences and conventions. Her books include the monographs Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach (McFarland, 2014), the co-authored Readers' Guide to Essential Criticism: Comics and Graphic Novels (Bloomsbury, 2022), and the co-edited collections Multimodal Comics (Intellect, 2024), The Routledge Companion to Literary Media (Routledge, 2023) and Real Lives, Celebrity Stories (Bloomsbury, 2014). Gothic for Girls won the 2019 Broken Frontier Award for Best Book on Comics and Julia has previously won the Inge Award for Comics Scholarship (2015) for her work on The Walking Dead. In 2024 she won the Kinnard Award for Comics Education. 

 

Over the past few years Julia has been experimenting with practice-based research. She published her first short comic, 'Doll Parts' (art by Catriona Laird), in the anthology Wilma: Whatever Happened to Girls' Comics? (Inkpot, 2017), and a second story, 'The Haunting of Julia Round' (art by Letty Wilson), in the anthology Retro (Inkpot, 2018). A third story, 'Borrowed Time' (art by Morgan Brinksman) was published in #6 of the 2000AD fanzine Sector 13  (2019), and her most recent story 'Hell or High Water' (art by Scott Twells) appeared in the anthology Anno Domini 1900 (2024).

 

Julia's most recent work explores Gothic in British children's comics, and includes the open access article 'Misty, Spellbound and the Lost Gothic of British Girls' Comics' (Palgrave Communications 3, 2017). You can read free extracts of lots of her work on this website and watch some of her lectures. Her award-winning book Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics is available from all usual outlets and mainstream booksellers. Her current projects are focused on increasing awareness and developing open access resources on British comics. She has also been Co-Investigator on two AHRC-funded projects exploring how digital technologies are transforming young people's reading.

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