Tahneer Oksman

Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar with a Ph.D. in English Literature who regularly publishes literary and cultural journalism and delivers public scholarship to audiences beyond the academy. Her specializations revolve around Literary Journalism and Creative Nonfiction; Memoir Studies; Comics, Media, and Visual Cultures; Contemporary American Literature; and Writing Studies.

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 multiple anthologies and journal special issues, including Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology (SUNY Press, 2023), The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself (UP Mississippi, 2019), and a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly, Chronic (May 2026). Her scholarly writing has appeared in journals and collections, including A/B: Auto/Biography Studies; American Jewish History; The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel; Contemporary Women’s Writing; Keywords for Comics Studies; Keywords and Keyimages in Graphic Medicine; Life Writing; Literature & Medicine; Social Research: An International Quarterly; Studies in American Jewish Literature; Studies in Comics; and many others.

Professor Oksman’s public engagement includes interviews and reviews related to comics, graphic novels, and memoir, and her writing can be found on NPR, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. You can also listen to her three-hour lecture series for The Great Courses, an Audible Original called Why Memoir Matters: Learning from the Lives of Others; her second lecture series, New York’s Literary Women, is forthcoming in 2027. She is a member of NBCC (National Book Critic’s Circle).

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