Peter Coogan

Peter Coogan
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	American
Education	Doctorate in American Studies
Alma mater	Michigan State University
Subject	Comics studies
Notable works	Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre

Peter M. Coogan is the director of the Institute for Comics Studies and co-founder and co-chair of the Comics Arts Conference, which runs during the San Diego Comic-Con International and San Francisco WonderCon.

Peter Coogan gained a doctorate in American Studies from Michigan State University, with his dissertation “The Secret Origin of the Superhero: The Emergence of the Superhero Genre in America from Daniel Boone to Batman” (2002), which he revised for wider publication in 2006 (see below).

He coined the term Wold-Newtonry in a paper titled "Wold-Newtonry: Theory and Methodology for the Literary Archeology of the Wold Newton Universe." In it, he talks about literary archaeology, a term which he says was inspired (for him) by Warren Ellis's term mystery archeologists in Ellis and Cassaday's Planetary comics. The paper is available online at Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton pages, and as a chapter in Win Scott Eckert's (ed.) Myths for the Modern Age book, published by MonkeyBrain Books.

Coogan co-edited (with Randall William Scott) the Comic Art Studies newsletter and also set up the Comics Studies Email service to "coordinate communication about comic scholarship." The newsletter's motto was Comica Amica Nobicum ("Comics Are Our Friends!") and originated from the Russel B. Nye Popular Culture Collection, to "facilitate communication about the Comic Art Collection at Michigan State University, and communication about public comics collecting and scholarship in general."

In 2005, Coogan presented a paper titled "The Definition of the Superhero" at the interdisciplinary Holy Men in Tights Superheroes Conference at the School of Art History, Cinema, Classics & Archaeology (AHCCA), University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia.

...
Wikipedia