Americanist Colloquium: Hillary Chute “Hiroshima and Auschwitz: the Postwar Comics Field and Documentary Form”

Event time: 
Thursday, April 9, 2015 - 4:30pm
Location: 
Linsly-Chittenden Hall (LC), LC319 See map
63 High St.
New Haven, CT 06511
(Location is wheelchair accessible)
Event description: 

“Hiroshima and Auschwitz: the Postwar Comics Field and Documentary Form”

Hillary Chute is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, where she is also Associate Faculty in the Department of Visual Arts. Her current teaching and research interests lie in contemporary American literature, specifically in how public and private histories take shape in the form of innovative narrative work. She is particularly interested in the relationships between word and image, fiction and nonfiction that we see in contemporary comics, a field with roots in the 1970s that is also connected to deeper histories of drawn reportage and visual witnessing.

She is the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia UP), as well as Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (UChicago P). In spring of 2014, she co-edited a special edition of Critical Inquiry on “Comics and Media” with Patrick Jagoda.

Her next book, “Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form,” will look at the post-World War II environment in which Art Spiegelman in America and Keiji Nakazawa in Japan concurrently developed comics as a form for addressing the fallout of war; it will also explore graphic reportage by figures such as Joe Sacco on the Balkans and the Middle East.

Hilary Chute is also the Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011).

203-432-2233