Monday, March 20, 2006

Superheroes and Academia

The previous post about religious superheroes set me thinking. What academic affiliations do superheroes and supervillains have?

The most obvious place to start is the Fantastic Four, since Reed Richards is known to have attended CalTech, Columbia, Harvard, and the fictional Empire State University (although sometimes it is said to be the equally fictional SUNY-Hegeman). The latter appears to be the alma mater of a lot of Marvel superheroes.

So what others are there (real universities, of course, are more interesting than fictional ones)?

UPDATES: I had forgotten, if I ever knew it, that Captain Marvel was a university professor at "Dartmoor University". (I've never kept up with Captain Marvel at all.)

Charles Xavier apparently did his graduate work at the University of Oxford.

Firestorm is one-half college professor, being a fusion of a high school student and Martin Stein, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, who seems to have taught at the University of Pittsburgh (although previously at Hudson University, a major fictional university in the DC universe). (I have found no explicit statements about the University of Pittsburgh, though, so that's speculative.)