Unflattening

Nick Sousanis is an American comic writer and associate professor of comics studies at San Francisco State University. He has an interdisciplinary background that includes playing professional tennis, majoring in mathematics, and the cofounding of The Detroiter arts and culture site.

Sousanis advocates for the inclusion of visual thinking in education. He wrote his 2014 doctoral dissertation (an earlier version of Unflattening) in comic form and made such a powerful case for this mode of presentation that he was nominated for the Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic work of 2015. He won the award in 2018 for A Life in Comics, a graphic novel biography of Columbia University librarian Karen Green.

Although Sousanis does not appear explicitly as a character in Unflattening, his life and views permeate the text. For example, the default figure the work depicts is male and has white facial characteristics like Sousanis. The experience of being a new father—his daughter was born three weeks before he finished the book—might have also influenced Sousanis, who in his Paris Review interview states that he wanted to “end the book with a child’s eyes looking upward and outward, with the idea of seeing as if for the first time” (Sousanis, Nick.