Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and Director of Undergraduate Studies (German) in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where she lives, works, and learns on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.Before joining the faculty at UBC and returning home to Vancouver, she taught at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington (2018-2019) and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Freie Universität in Berlin (2017-2018). She graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2017.
Biz’s research and teaching examine the representation of history in comics, comics and new media on forced migration, intersections between Indigenous studies and German, European, and migration studies, and feminist methodologies in the graphic arts.
At UBC, she leads the Narratives Research Group in the UBC Centre for Migration Studies and founded and co-leads the recently established Comic Studies Research Cluster in UBC’s Public Humanities Hub. Biz is also the Equity Chair for German Studies Canada and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum and the Executive Board of the Comics Studies Society.
She is currently completing her book manuscript, Graphic Historiography: Teaching History & Memory through Comics and Graphic Novels (Ohio State University Press), which she began as a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo (2019-2021).
For all advising inquiries for the undergraduate German program, please email Biz at ubc.german@ubc.ca.
Teaching and Outreach
For information on Biz’s teaching, see her Courses Page here.
Biz is a Co-Organizer of Arts Multilingual Week, UBC Vancouver, the first of which took place from October 31st to November 4th, 2022.
Arts Multilingual Week 2022 featured 19 events and over 950 students, scholars, and community members reflecting on multilingualism as a practice, discussing career opportunities for multilingual graduates, and performing multilingualism through artistic means and has generated measurable excitement for language learning at UBC. In addition to Lightning Talks on Multilingual Pedagogies and various events on multilingualism in teaching, research, and community practice, Arts Multilingual Week also featured conversations on Indigenous languages and the Indigenous Atlas of Canada, Indigenizing language programs, a virtual American Sign Language (ASL) workshop, an introduction to DeafBlind Pro-tactile Communication, and a presentation on the Deaf community and the marginalization of signed languages by local celebrity and UBC instructor Nigel Howard.
The highlight of this week of programming was student-centred events: an exhibition of untranslatable words and idioms, a Speech Contest on “What Multilingualism means to me…” and a Multilingual Poetry Slam.
The next Arts Multilingual Week will take place in March 2024.