On 20 September 2014 the one-day international workshop “Empirical Approaches to Comics” took place at Literaturwerkstatt Berlin. This was the first of a series of regular workshops (and a final three-day conference) the research group is planning for the coming years. The speakers were: Neil Cohn (UC San Diego), Alexander Dunst and Rita Hartel (Paderborn), Jochen Laubrock (Potsdam), Karin Kukkonen (Turku), Tim Smith (Birkbeck), and John Walsh (Indiana).
The workshop closed with a round-table discussion chaired by Martin Fischer (Potsdam). You can find an in-depth report on the workshop, written by comics scholar and publisher Christian Bachmann for the German Society of Comics Studies here (in German): http://comicsforum.org/2014/10/31/the-bi-monthly-comfor-update-october-2014-by-laura-oehme/
A short summary of the report can also be found on comicsforum.org: http://comicsforum.org/2014/10/31/the-bi-monthly-comfor-update-october-2014-by-laura-oehme/