Heroic effort underway to study national narratives

Dr Jason Dittmer has been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant to conduct a comparative study of nationalist superhero narratives in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

The project will run from January 2008 until December 2008, and will extend Dr Dittmer’s ongoing research on North American nationalist superheroes to include British heroes such as Captain Britain and Union Jack. The goals of the project are twofold: 1) To analyse the production of British identity through nationalist superheroes and fans’ reactions to them; 2) To compare that production process and its outcomes to the prior and ongoing research conducted on American and Canadian nationalist superheroes.

Dr Dittmer says that that research like this is important because: “it effectively broadens that which is designated as ‘of geopolitical significance’ within academia. Whereas traditionally geopolitics has focused on the actions of states and international governance, my work attempts to show the banal processes of acculturation through which geopolitical imaginations are established.”