Mervi Miettinen, Ph.L., is a PhD student at the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies at the University of Tampere. She received both her BA and MA in English philology from the University of Tampere. She successfully defended her Licentiate’s Thesis, titled “Superhero Comics and the Geopolitics of American Identity”, in March 2011, and will continue her PhD research on the same topic. After a year as an ASLA/Fulbright research scholar at Bowling Green State University in Ohio in 2009-2010, she is currently located in Tampere, where she will teach a course called “Reading Superhero Comics: Form, History, Culture” at the University of Tampere this fall while aiming to finish her PhD dissertation by the end of 2012. She has presented several papers at comics-related conferences both in the UK and the United States. She has an upcoming article in an edited collection from John Benjamins later this year and an article pending publication in 2012 in a collection from McFarland.