Tahneer Oksman

Tahneer Oksman (she/her) is a writer, teacher, and scholar. Her interests revolve around Memoir Studies; Comics & Visual Culture; Literary Journalism; Contemporary Jewish American Literature; Feminist Literature & Theory; and Writing Studies, including Digital and Transmedia 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.

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), co-editor of The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), and co-editor, with her mentor and friend Nancy K. Miller, of a book of mostly first-person essays, Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology (SUNY Press, 2023). She is also co-editor of a multi-disciplinary Special Issue of Shofar: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, titled “What’s Jewish About Death?” (March 2021), and she is currently co-editing, once again with Nancy, a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly, titled, “Living with/chronic illness.” You can read the CFP here.

Tahneer’s public engagement includes interviews and reviews related to comics, graphic novels, and memoir, which can be found in publications like NPR, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She also recently wrote and recorded a three-hour lecture series for The Great Courses, an Audible Original called Why Memoir Matters: Learning from the Lives of Others.

Currently, Tahneer is also working on a book exploring memoirs about grief and why we read them.

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

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For some quick links, here’s an interview in Cleaver Magazine, in which Tahneer discusses her first book with scholar 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.