Content - Board with bios — Graphic Medicine Europe

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ERIN LA COUR
CO-CHAIR
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Associate Professor

Erin La Cour is Associate Professor in English Literature and Visual Culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and co-founder and co-director of Amsterdam Comics. Her research focuses on the intermediality and mediality of comics and on the theory and practice of graphic medicine. She has co-edited four comics studies collections, including Key Terms in Comics Studies (Palgrave 2022) and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and Eisner Award nominated “Graphic Medicine” (Biography 2022). She is co-author of the comics Ervaringskracht (produced with Jan Cleijne, Syndikaat 2025) and Why Graphic Medicine? (produced with John Miers, Vrije University Press 2026). From 2020-2021 she was a Comenius Fellow of The Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO), for which she conducted the project “Opening a Dialogue about Mental Health through Comics and Creative Writing” and from 2024-2029 she will lead her European Research Council Consolidator Grant project on Graphic Medicine, entitled “Where are the Humanities in the Medical Humanities? How Comics Can Improve Healthcare Training, Practice, and Dissemination.”

ALICE SCAVARDA
CO-CHAIR
University of Torino
Assistant Professor

Alice Scavarda is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Turin. Her work lies at the intersection of disability and neurodiversity studies and graphic medicine, exploring the potential of comics as interdisciplinary research and communication tools. She also uses comics for educational purposes in the fields of medicine and health sociology. She is the co-founder of Graphic Medicine Italia and sits on the editorial board of the Graphic Medicine Review. She teaches Graphic Medicine on the Nursing degree programme. She has published numerous papers on graphic medicine in international journals, as well as a book on the sociology of comics in Italian.

OCTAVIA ROODT
BOARD MEMBER & SITE DESIGNER
KU Leuven & LUCA School of Arts
PhD candidate & Artist

Octavia Roodt is a South African comic artist-turned researcher, affiliated with the Media and Persuasion Lab at KU Leuven and the Unfolding Ecologies research cluster at LUCA School of Arts. Her artistic work informs her approach as a doctoral researcher at the intersection of sociology and the arts. After a residency in Angoulême, she followed her love for Belgian comics to the comic strip museum in Brussels, where she completed a year long residency within a team of Francophone and Dutch-language authors. Her research focuses on health humanities and the emerging field of graphic medicine, examining how comics can articulate experiences of medicine, health, and care. Her PhD project aims to empower people living with dementia to express the lived dimensions of the diagnosis by developing characters and narrative worlds.

ANA PATRÍCIA HILÁRIO
BOARD MEMBER & SECRETARY
Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa
Assistant Professor

Ana Patrícia Hilário is a Medical Sociologist whose work lies at the intersection of the Sociology of Health and Public Health. She is a Research Fellow and Coordinator of the LIFE Research Group at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, and an Assistant Professor in the PhD Programme OpenSoc at the same institution. She is a member of the CHARM Network and of the Task Force on LGBT+ Inclusive Palliative and End-of-Life Care of the European Association for Palliative Care. Dr. Hilário serves on the editorial boards of Sociology of Health & Illness and Análise Social, and she is currently Co-Coordinator of the Research Network on Sociology of Health and Medicine of the European Sociological Association. Her research focuses on children and adults living with life-threatening and life-limiting illnesses, public health emergencies, particularly vaccine hesitancy and antimicrobial resistance, and qualitative methodologies, including ethnography, visual, and participatory methods.

VERONICA MORETTI
BOARD MEMBER
University of Bologna
Associate Professor

Veronica Moretti is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Bologna, where she also serves as Coordinator of the BA Programme in Sociology. Her research lies at the intersection of medical sociology, visual studies, and narrative -based medicine in healthcare, with a particular focus on comics as epistemological and pedagogical tools. Veronica is also one of founder and Vice-President of Graphic Medicine Italia and she teaches Graphic-Based Medicine within the Medical School at the University of Bologna, where she integrates comics into medical education, reflective practice, and the exploration of professional identity formation.
She is the founder and scientific curator of Graphic Anatomy, a comics series published by BeccoGiallo, which explores patients’ stories and experiences of illness through graphic storytelling. She also published the graphic novel The First Patient, further consolidating her work at the crossroads of comics and medical humanities.

ESZTER SZEP
BOARD MEMBER
Aalto University
Postdoc & Artist

Eszter Szép is a postdoctoral researcher in creative health at the Department of Art and Media, Aalto University, Finland. She works for and with comics: making, thinking, teaching, workshopping (worshipping), writing, editing, organizing. Her book, Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability came out in December 2020 with the Ohio State University Press. She is active in international comics scholarship, including serving as book reviews editor for the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and a Fulbright research grant in comics and design at the University of Oregon (2023-4). She is founding member of The Random Factor Comics Collective (CRO-HU-RO) and is member of the Kutikuti comics collective (FI).

JOHN MIERS
BOARD MEMBER

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & Kingston School of Art
Lecturer, Postdoc & Artist

MUNA AL-JAWAD
BOARD MEMBER

Brighton & Sussex Medical School
Associate Professor, Physician & Artist

IAN WILLIAMS
BOARD MEMBER
Physician & Artist