Tahneer Oksman

Tahneer Oksman (she/her) is a writer, teacher, and scholar. Her interests revolve around comics and visual narrative; feminist literature; memoir studies; contemporary Jewish American literature; cultural criticism; grief studies; and writing studies, including media and digital literacies. Tahneer is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Language, with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and Media Arts at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, where she teaches classes in writing, literature and comics, and journalism. She regularly delivers talks for academic and public audiences on her topics of interest.

Her interviews and reviews related to comics, graphic novels, and memoir can be found in publications including NPR, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Comics Journal, The Forward, The Guardian, BookTrib, The Believer, Publisher’s Weekly, and The Women’s Review of Books, among others.

She is author of “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press, 2016), and co-editor of The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), winner of the 2020 Comics Studies Society (CSS) Prize for Best Edited Collection. With Laura Limonic, she is co-editor of a multi-disciplinary Special Issue of Shofar: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, titled “What’s Jewish About Death?” (March 2021). You can read their intro here.

Currently, she is working on a new book exploring memoirs about grief and why we read them. She is also co-editor, with her mentor and friend Nancy K. Miller, of a book of mostly first-person essays, Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology (Feb. 2023), a 2023-2024 Jewish Women’s Archive Book Club pick. Here’s an interview in which they discuss how the collection came about. Tahneer and Nancy are now working together again, this time as co-editors of a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly, titled, “Living with/chronic illness.”

Tahneer lives in Brooklyn, with her partner, two kids, and a dog, and loves talking about podcasts.

Here’s her Academic CV.

Here’s an interview in Cleaver Magazine, in which she discusses her first book with Ranen Omer-Sherman. Here’s an interview for Penguin Random House Education's Comics Education in Conversation blog. Here’s a Sept. 2024 Op-Ed she published with Inside Higher Ed, “A Call for Digital Literacy Across the Curriculum.”

Here’s a recording of a talk she gave for the Yiddish Book Center, called “Family Secrets and the Graphic Novel: Rutu Modan’s The Property and Nora Krug’s Belonging.” And here’s a talk, “Visual // Grief,” that she gave for the Oxford Comics Network Winter Seminar Series 2021, sponsored by TORCH (The Oxford Research Center for Humanities).

You can find her sometimes on Instagram.