Walter Nickell "Nick" Sousanis is an American scholar, art critic, and cartoonist; a co-founder of the TheDetroiter.com, he is also the first person at Columbia University to write a dissertation entirely in a comic book format.

In early 2008, Sousanis moved from Detroit to New York City to pursue a Doctorate of Education in Interdisciplinary Studies at Columbia University's Teachers College.

[20] Talks were given by Maxine Greene, Tony Wagner, Fred Goodman, and Donald Brinkman at the concurrent conference for Creativity, Play, and Imagination Across Disciplines.

[22] His dissertation was published by Harvard University Press in April 2015 as Unflattening;[23] the New York Times called it: a genuine oddity, a philosophical treatise in comics form.

'Flatness,' for Sousanis's purposes, is not the quality of abstraction that Clement Greenberg lauded in modern art, but the lamentable condition of the inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott's 'Flatland': the inability to understand that there might be more than one can immediately perceive.