Christina M. Knopf, PhD

Secret Origin Story

As soon as she learned how to write, Christina Knopf wanted to write. Her first opus was a play starring stick puppets of teeth her class made in the first grade. By third grade, she was writing her own children’s stories. By eighth grade, she was sending angsty poetry and clever puns out into the void of rejection. By tenth grade, she was writing short stories about loneliness and romance. And by the eleventh grade, her guidance counselor convinced her the only way she was going to make a living as a writer was as a journalist. (She had more scientific inclinations but was thwarted by the maths.) So, she went off to the local community college to major in communications. She soon discovered that broadcast journalism required more technical skills than she possessed, but that the writing, editing, and layouts for public relations was a lot of fun. So, she changed schools to study PR and journalism.

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A cross between Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane – an intrepid girl news photographer - she soon became fascinated with how men like Lex Luthor get elected president, so she went to graduate school, a breeding ground for supervillains. This turned her from her away from her pre-destiny as an only-child, like Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, to become a superhero. After earning a PhD in sociology and communication, she, like Drs. Jonathan Crane, Harleen Quinzel, and Viktor Fries, became an outcast professor and researcher, struggling to be taken seriously... and constantly complaining that she is cold.

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A student of presidential address, and the child of an army veteran and pop-history fan, Dr. Knopf took an interest in the rhetoric surrounding war, both official and popular. Looking to leverage the combined power of Scarecrow’s horror and Harley’s humor, she eventually became a recognized expert in military cartooning.

This work proved to be her portal to the multiverse of politics of popular culture. Military cartooning led to war movies and comics studies, which led to genre fictions in film and television, which led to spectralities studies... Along the way, these worlds overlapped with broader systems of public memory, satire, visual communication, gender, freakery, spirituality, and more. – from comics to camp, propaganda to protest, and serials to cinema, she looks for the strings tugging at the mediated puppets entertaining us.

Like all supervillains, Dr. Knopf pursued a singular obsession: writing. 

And though she now has more than 60 publications, and counting, and more than 130 presented papers, her designs on world domination are repeatedly thwarted by laundry and a mortgage, so she has settled for defeating simulacra of superheroes in her creations as an amateur cosplayer and baker.