Transnational Comics Studies Workshop

Thursday, January 19, 2017 5:00-7:00 PM Michigan Theater Leading graphic historical novelist Joe Sacco will chronicle how and why he uses the graphic novel format to catalyze social justice and human rights struggles in the U.S. and around the world. His award-winning novels include Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (a portrait of some of the most marginalized communities in the United States, co-created with Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges); Footnotes in Gaza (a narrative of oral histories collected from elderly Palestinians who witnessed and survived a mass murder during the 1956 Suez War); and Safe Area Gorazde (an account of the brutal effects of the war in the former Yugoslavia on a besieged town that Sacco visited during and after the war). This presentation is part of a series on social justice-oriented graphic novels organized by the International Institute’s Enterprise-funded Conflict and Peace Initiative. The event is in partnership with the Penny Stamps Distingui

Please join the Transnational Comics Studies Workshop on Friday, January 13th from 2:30-4pm in the Hatcher Library Gallery (Room 100) for a presentation by Dr. Frederik Byrn Køhlert on Disability and Representation in Autobiographical Comics. Disability and Representation in Autobiographical Comics As studies of disability have long pointed out, to be figured as disabled is in key ways to be seen, and to always be the subject of others’ curiosity. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, influentially, has argued that in disability’s “economy of visual difference, those bodies deemed inferior become spectacles of otherness while the unmarked are sheltered in the neutral space of normalcy.” In the form of comics, this particular relationship with visual embodiment is placed front and center for the reader to engage with, through drawn imagery on the page. For autobiographical comics, especially, this relationship raises questions about how authors might employ various visual codes i