Graphic Medicine Praxis

Erin La Cour is Associate Professor in English Literature and Visual Culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and co-founder and co-director of Amsterdam Comics. Her research focuses on the intermediality and mediality of comics and on the theory and practice of graphic medicine.

She has co-edited four comics studies collections, including Key Terms in Comics Studies (Palgrave 2022) and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and Eisner Award nominated “Graphic Medicine” (Biography 2022). She is co-author of the comics Ervaringskracht (produced with Jan Cleijne, Syndikaat 2025) and Why Graphic Medicine? (produced with John Miers, Vrije University Press 2026). From 2020–2021 she was a Comenius Fellow of The Netherlands Initiative for Education Research (NRO), for which she conducted the project “Opening a Dialogue about Mental Health through Comics and Creative Writing” and from 2024–2029 she will lead her European Research Council Consolidator Grant project on Graphic Medicine, entitled “Where are the Humanities in the Medical Humanities? How Comics Can Improve Healthcare Training, Practice, and Dissemination.”

John Miers is a cartoonist, illustrator, and senior lecturer in Illustration and Critical and Historical Studies at Kingston School of Art. His research centres on narrative illustration, visual metaphor, and Graphic Medicine. His comics on the experience of multiple sclerosis have been recognised internationally, including by the Wellcome Collection. He is also a Research Associate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, working on a major ERC project on the institutional adoption of Graphic Medicine.

He has an extensive practice-based research output spanning visual metaphor, drawing theory, and comics scholarship.

Tanne Harris-Nijmeijer is a PhD-researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, focusing on graphic medicine and medical humanities teaching in medical education across the Netherlands, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. They are also interested in the representation of neurodivergence in (web)comics, and the relationship between critical neurodiversity studies, critical disability studies, graphic medicine, and the medical humanities.

Lucie Morel is a French artist and PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her practice lies at the intersection of drawing, comics, and research, exploring how graphic forms can make perceptible subjective experiences that are difficult to express or share.

Having lived with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) since childhood, she is particularly interested in representing the lived experience of OCD and in exploring how drawing can contribute to a better understanding of experiences related to mental health. In 2025, she published Toc Toc, an autobiographical comic that combines personal narrative, scientific communication, and self-deprecating humour.

As part of her artistic PhD in Graphic Medicine at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, she develops her research through drawing and comics practice. Her dissertation will itself take the form of a comic, making artistic practice at once its subject, method, and means of producing knowledge.