About

Prof. Todd was a tenured Professor of English and Director of Composition at Defiance College for fifteen years; he returned to the Mid-Ohio Valley in 2020 to marry the wonderful Erin Zerbe-Comer, an art professor at Marietta College. Prof. Todd is currently a Visiting Associate Professor of English at Muskingum University.

When Todd is not listening to Tom Waits or Sufjan Stevens he is drinking coffee, petting a cat, or writing poems about his new hometown, Marietta, Ohio.

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Todd has published on comics, movies, TV, and experimental fiction. While his dissertation focused on American literature and film, he is an eclectic scholar, and deeply dedicated to the methodology implicit in the liberal arts and interdisciplinarity. He recently (October, 2022) presented a paper on Pixar’s Wall-E at the Midwest Popular Culture Association’s annual conference. The above paper, the first chapter in Prof Todd’s next monograph, develops a new theory merging the central insights of ecocriticism and disability studies. In 2020, Todd, with Dr. Christine Junker, co-edited a double issue for Studies in the Humanities focused on the intersection of disability studies and ecocriticism.

In the winter of 2018, Todd published “The Politics of Disability in Octavia Butler’s  Kindred” in the Journal of Narrative Theory. In the spring of 2017, Todd gave the keynote address at the SAGES Fifth Annual Interdisciplinary Student Conference (Akron, Ohio). His talk was entitled “Birth and the Mourning After: Posthumanism.” In 2016, Todd published “The Hidden Architecture of Disability in Chris Ware’s Building Stories” (in Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives) and the “The Disabled Hero: Being and Ethics in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings” (Mythlore). Todd has co-edited Terror and the Cinematic Sublime: Essays on Violence and the Unpresentable in Post-9/11 Film and Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore. Todd has also published on Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski, Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds, and Doctor Who.