Essi Varis works as a comics researcher and a PhD candidate in literature at the Department of Art and Culture Studies of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She graduated as Licentiate of Philosophy from the same department in 2013. Her licentiate’s thesis suggested a cognitive theory of comic book characters, which she is currently applying to new contexts in her doctoral compilation dissertation, Graphic Human Experiments: Functions and Cognitive Logics of Characters in Comics (forthcoming in 2017). During her studies, Varis has also organized interdisciplinary conferences on geek culture and posthumanist art and media. She is planning a post-doctoral project on the comics adaptations of Frankenstein