Karen Healey

Karen Healey is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. She is a New Zealander living in Australia writing a dissertation on the fan culture of American superhero comics. People sometimes find this confusing. Occasionally, because it seems too much like fun to be real work.

Before this, she taught English in Japan for two years, where she learned a lot about how to improvise a lesson plan in four minutes, how to pretend she knew what the dance moves were at the local festival and how much her heart could grow (three sizes, metric). Her Japanese got a little better, but her repertoire of amusing gestures increased exponentially.

Karen likes chocolate with honeycomb bits, stories about plucky teenagers triumphing over adversity, and tripartite sentences. She dislikes pumpkins as anything other than soup and signs with extraneous speech marks.

She would like to be a professional academic, a professional fiction writer, and a part-time zeppelin pirate.