Endorsed Works

Many of our deligates and steering group members have produced outstanding work that we at the Superhero Project wish to promote. Below, you will find a collection of works that showcase some of our team at their superhero best.

Costume defines the superhero, disguising and distinguishing him or her from the civilian alter ego. The often garish garb expresses a hero's otherness and empowers its wearers to seek a primal form of justice.

This book provides the first interdisciplinary analysis of the superhero costume and investigates wide-ranging issues such as identity, otherness, ritual dress and disguise. Analysis focuses on the implications of wearing superhero costume, exploring interpretations of the costumed hero and the extent to which the costume defines his or her role. Using examples across various media (comic books, film, and television) with case studies including The X-Men, Watchmen, real-life superheroes such as Phoenix Jones and Pussy Riot, and audience activities such as cosplay, The Superhero Costume presents new perspectives on the increasingly popular genre.

A lively and thorough account of superhero fashions throughout history, The Superhero Costume will be essential reading for students of visual culture, popular culture, fashion and cultural studies.

Discover the secrets of Doctor Strange--Master of the Mystic Arts, Sorcerer Supreme and Marvel Comic's most magical Super Hero--in The Mysterious World of Doctor Strange.

This lavishly illustrated guide offers a magical mystery tour of the unique, mind-bending universe of Stephen Strange, Marvel's magical Super Hero extraordinaire. The brainchild of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Doctor Strange opens the doors to a wonderland of otherworldly dimensions, mystics and monsters, and demons and demigods.

Packed with fantastic facts and astonishing artwork selected from over 50 years of Doctor Strange's awesome comic adventures, The Mysterious World of Doctor Strange will delight new and die-hard Marvel fans

Today, we are living in the New Space Age, where mass commercial space travel is almost within our grasp. This otherworldly possibility has opened up new cultural images of space, both real and fictional, and has caused fashion design and spacesuit engineering to intersect in new, exciting ways. Spacewear traverses this uncharted territory by exploring the changing imagination of space in fashion-and fashion in space-from the first Space Age to the 21st century. Exploring how space travel has stylistically and technologically framed fashion design on earth and how we need to revisit established design practices for the weightless environment, Spacewear connects the catwalk and the space station.

This book draws together speculative fantasies in sci-fi films such as Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the engineered spacesuits Biosuit, and the NASA Z-2 and with catwalk interpretations by the likes of Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, André Courrèges, and Iris van Herpen. While the development of commercial space agencies has led to new concerns for style in garments for outer space that re-think fundamental design principles such as drape, high fashion has experimented with new possibilities for weightlessness that extend far beyond the 1960s vision of Space Age metallic fabrics and helmet-style headwear.

Brownie takes the reader on a fascinating journey from fantasy to function and to form, deepening our understanding of this new category of fashion that is prompting new approaches to garment design and construction both on earth and in outer space.

The act of undressing has a multitude of meanings, which vary dramatically when this commonly private gesture is presented for public consumption. This ground-breaking book explores the significance of undressing in various cultural and social contexts.

As we are increasingly obsessed with dress choices as signifiers of who we are and how we feel, an investigation into what happens as we remove our clothes has never been more pertinent. Exploring three main issues - politics, tease, and clothes without bodies - Acts of Undressing discusses these key themes through an in-depth and eclectic mix of case studies including flashing at Mardi Gras, the World Burlesque Games, and 'shoefiti' used by gangs to mark territories.

Building on leading theories of dress and the body, from academics including Roland Barthes and Mario Perniolato, Ruth Barcan and Erving Goffman, Acts of Undressing is essential reading for students of fashion, sociology, anthropology, visual culture, and related subjects.

Although the healing powers of poetry have been known and discussed since antiquity, there has never been any serious research into the matter until the middle of the 20th century. In the 1960s, Poetry Therapy was developed in the USA and has been employed as a modern psychotherapeutical method ever since. While this interdisciplinary approach allows psychotherapy to tap into the inherent healing power that poetry represents, research has still not been undertaken into more fundamental questions such as why poetic writing is therapeutical in the first place, in which manner the processes of writing poetry facilitate an increased participation of the unconscious, and the specific ways in which therapeutically relevant material becomes woven into the empirical poetic text and can subsequently be spotted, extracted and utilised for the therapeutic encounter. This study engages with these questions by providing a foundation for the poetic side of Poetry Therapy from a literary perspective, appropriating post-structuralist literary (theoretical) concepts for Poetry Therapy. Following a delineation of the present situation of Poetry Therapy as a discipline, theoretical concepts of Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Foucault and others are employed to fashion a model of Poetry Therapy that can trace and utilise the connections between the unconscious, poetic writing and therapy. Concepts of metaphor, intertextuality as well as narrative identity are further brought to bear on the issues of poetic writing in a therapeutic context. Poetry Therapy is thus conceptualised post-structurally as a palimpsestuous process of writing in which the poem serves as a key therapeutic node within the larger semiotic field of therapy.