Nathan Vernon Madison is an historian and author based in the Richmond area, a graduate of the University of Mary Washington (B.A.) and Virginia Commonwealth University (M.A.). His first book, Anti-Foreign Imagery in American Pulps and Comic Books (2013), was nominated in 2014 for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for best academic work; the four-volume Comics Through Time: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas (2014), to which he contributed several essays, was similarly nominated the following year. He has presented panels and presentations at San Diego Comic Con, Wizard World, and hosts of science fiction, anime and general popular culture conventions across the country; he has also participated in or co-produced documentaries airing on C-SPAN, PBS, and PBS, including serving as a consultant for director James Cameron’s The Story of Science Fiction, on AMC. He serves on the Editorial Board of the Pulp Magazines Project, an academic, digital repository dedicated to preserving late nineteenth and early twentieth century popular literature. He also studies and writes on industrial history, his works in that field including: Tredegar Iron Works – Richmond’s Foundry on the James (2015); a chronicle of industrial Richmond written for the Society for Industrial Archaeology (2018); and The Richmond Locomotive and Machine Works – Engine of the Old Dominion (2023). He is a member of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, and the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. His current projects include an edited collection of memoirs concerning the early years of anime fandom in America; a biography of magazine publisher Frank Munsey; and a history of science fiction magazines as part of RavenCon’s observance of the genre’s 100th Anniversary in 2026.
