Distinguished Faculty Lecture with Alison Bechdel & Hillary Chute

     
Alison Bechdel, internationally acclaimed, award winning cartoonist, author of graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother, in a freewheeling, multimedia conversation/confab with distinguished scholar Hillary Chute, author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia Univ. Press: 2010). 

For twenty-five years, Alison Bechdel created the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was named Best Book of 2006 by Time Magazine. In 2008, she began devoting herself full-time to autobiographical work. A second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama, was published in 2012. She’s the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Marsh Professor-at Large at the University of Vermont.

Hillary Chute is the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia UP, 2010) and Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011). In 2006, she co-edited the “Graphic Narrative” special issue of Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies—the first issue of an academic journal in literature devoted to exploring comics. In 2009, she founded the Modern Language Association’s Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives.Her essays have appeared in American Periodicals, Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Twentieth-Century Literature, and WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. Her current book project is titled Disaster is My Muse: Visual Witnessing, Comics, and Documentary Form. She is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in English at the University of Chicago. Chute is currently co-editing a special issue of Critical Inquiry on “Comics and Media.” She has written for publications including: The Village Voice, The Believer and Poetry.