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The MSU Museum is undergoing an 18-month renovation, with a planned reopening in January 2026. During this time, we continue to create experiences at the intersection of arts, sciences, cultures, and technologies.

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Julian C. Chambliss

Val Berryman Curator of History

Professor of English
Department of English/History
Core Faculty, Consortium for Critical Diversity in Digital Age Research (CEDAR)

Julian C. Chambliss is a Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. In addition, he is a co-director for the Department of English Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (DHLC). His research focuses on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. His recent writing has appeared in Scholarly Editing, Genealogy,  KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, and The Conversation US.

Selected Exhibitions

  • “Take Off! Comic Artists from the Great White North.” In conjunction with the 2019 MSU Comics Forum, Co-Curator, Michigan State University Main Library, East Lansing, MI, January 14th-February 24th.
  • “Art in Odd Places Orlando” Exhibition, November 2017, Co-curator, Downtown Arts District, Orlando, Florida.
  • “AfroFantastic: Black Imagination and Agency in the American Experience,” Exhibition, January-April 2017, Curator, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.
  • “Beyond the Color Line,” Public History Exhibition, February-March 2017, Curator, Orlando City Hall Rotunda, Orlando, Florida.
  • “Future Bear,” 2014 Faculty Exhibition, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL (March-August 2014).
  • “Transit Interpretation Project [TrIP],” Downtown Development Board Office Gallery, Orlando, Florida (June 2014).
  • “Project Mosaic: Space and Place in the Construction of Identity,” Poster and Photograph Exhibition, January 2013, Curator, Jacksonville Main Library. Jacksonville, Florida.
  • “Techno: The Rise of Detroit’s Machine Music,” Curator, Physical Exhibition, MSU Museum, East Lansing, February 4th -April 30th 2025.

Selected Publications

  • Walter Greason and Julian Chambliss, Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History, 1st edition (Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2018).
  • Julian C. Chambliss, William L. Svitavsky, and Daniel Fandino, Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domains (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2018).
  • Julian C. Chambliss, Thomas Donaldson, and William Svitavsky, eds., Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).
  • “An Afrofuturist Legacy: Neil Knight and Black Speculative Capital,” in Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, ed. Qiana Whitted, 1st ed. (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2023), 281–96.
  • Julian Chambliss, “Afrofantastic Presents: The Many Deaths of Oscar Mack,” Third Stone 3, no. 1 (December 7, 2023), https://repository.rit.edu/thirdstone/vol3/iss1/4.
  • Julian Chambliss, “A View of Black Speculative Past and Future: An Interview with Tim Fielder,” Third Stone 3, no. 1 (December 7, 2023), https://repository.rit.edu/thirdstone/vol3/iss1/5.
  • Julian Chambliss, “Afrofantastic Presents: The Many Deaths of Oscar Mack,” Third Stone 3, no. 1 (December 7, 2023), https://repository.rit.edu/thirdstone/vol3/iss1/4.
  • Julian Chambliss, “A View of Black Speculative Past and Future: An Interview with Tim Fielder,” Third Stone 3, no. 1 (December 7, 2023),  https://repository.rit.edu/thirdstone/vol3/iss1/5.
  • Mapping Afrofuturism: Understanding Black Speculative Practice  (Cognella Academic Publishing, Solana Beach, CA, 2024).
  • Julian C. Chambliss and Scot French, “The Robert Hungerford School and Black Speculative Counterpublics in Eatonville, Florida,” in The Art of Antiracism: Aesthetics, Race, and Contemporary Political Theory, eds. Alex Zamalin and Alix Lindsey (SUNY Press, 2025).

Selected Public/Digital Humanities Projects

Critical Fanscape
Critical Fanscape is a collaborative digital project that utilize undergraduate collaborators to explore the MSU Library Comics Art Collection “Publication about Comics” subset. This project emphasizes digital recovery and understanding the critical cultural context linked to archive practice. http://bit.ly/CriticalFan

Advocate Recovered
Advocate Recovered is a digital recovery project focused on collecting and transcribing the fragment of the Winter Park Advocate, an African American newspaper published in Winter Park, Florida in the 1890s.

Reframing History
Reframing History is produced and hosted by Julian C. Chambliss and explores how historical narratives shape our perceptions of contemporary culture.

Every Tongue Got to Confess Podcast
Every Tongue Got to Confess is produced by the University of Central Florida Department of History, Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR), and the Association to Preserve Eatonville Community to explore issues linked to communities of color in the United States.

The intersection of speculative practice and liberation defines what we mean when we say Afrofuturism. Striving toward freedom has required the black imagination to see new paths and imagine different worlds. (Writer, Director, and Producer, Documentary, WKAR PBS June 19, 2023, www.afrofantastic.com.)
A biographical comic created to tell the story of the Creativity in the Time of Covid-19, part of a Mellon funded grant conducted by Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition (DHLC) Lab in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Julian Chambliss et al., “The World’s Greatest in Creativity in the Time of Covid-19: The Teams Secret Origins Revealed” (Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab, October 1, 2024).
RISE: Detroit’s  Machine Music Podcast
A podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and imaginative roots of techno, one of the most influential electronic music genres in the world. Journey deep into the sonic landscapes of Detroit, unpacking the forces that shaped the birth of techno and the visionary Black youth who created it.