Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

Lines of Transmission: Comics and Autobiography

Cartoonist Alison Bechdel and literary scholar Hillary Chute work out terms for a new critical language with which to engage nonfiction comics.

The collaboration between field-defining cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and Are You My Mother? (Houghton Mifflin, 2012) and Hillary Chute, author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010) aimed to be a template-setting model for intellectual inquiry in an area of word-and-image inquiry that is rapidly becoming a part of university study at all levels. As a cartoonist, and as a scholar of contemporary comics, both Bechdel and Chute work in fields that are in flux, and in which the critical language, indeed, the entire critical apparatus is open to debate and discussion.

This fellowship aimed to open the lines of conversation between cartoonists and scholars in a way that would enrich discourse in their respective fields and create new languages for talking about the field of literature today.  We’re at a moment now in which there is public interest in comics, and yet a deficient critical vocabulary; people don’t know how to talk about contemporary comics narratives historically or formally. This collaboration aspired to be a significant opportunity to fill a critical gap.

Project Inventory
a team-taught course for undergraduate and graduate students entitled Lines of Transmission: Comics and Autobiography run through the English Department and situated in the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; a co-curated exhibition at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality: Fevered Archives: 30 Years of Comics from the Not So Mixed Up Files of Alison Bechdel, April 5-June 7, 2012;the international conference Comics: Philosophy & Comics (May 18-20, 2012); a co-presented workshop at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality: First Person Graphic: Comics in Theory and Practice (April 2012); a joint presentation of research, On Comics and Autobiography, for college faculty advisers at the Advisers Faculty Breakfast series (April 2012); a reading and presentation of Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? sponsored by Creative Writing (April 2012); a joint presentation at the School of the Art Institute, Department of Visual and Critical Studies entitled Comics and Autobiography (April 2012); Bechdel reading from Are You My Mother? (released May 2012) at Women and Children First and other local venues, Chicago (May 2012); A video interview of Bechdel (by Chute) for the Critical Inquiry website (December 2011); and related press coverage, including a piece in The New Yorker by Judith Thurman,  and co-authorship of a cover story in the Chicago Tribune Printers Row literary journal (May 20, 2012).

Conference

Comics: Philosophy & Practice Conference, May 18-20, 2012

Comics: Philosophy & Practice served as both the culmination of the Alison Bechdel/Hillary Chute fellowship and the Gray Center’s inaugural conference (it was also the first major conference to be held at the U of C’s brand new Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts).

Artists participating in the three-day conference, which featured lectures, panel discussions, conversations and a workshop, included: Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Justin Green, Ben Katchor, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Françoise Mouly, Gary Panter, Joe Sacco, Seth, Art Spiegelman, Carol Tyler, and Chris Ware.

The roster of participating academics included: James Chandler (Barbara E. & Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor, Depts of English and Cinema & Media Studies, Director, Franke Institute for the Humanities, Co-Director, Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture), Julie Cooper (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Political Science), W.J.T Mitchell (Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor, Dept. of English and Art History), Deborah Nelson (Associate Professor, Dept. of English and Associate Provost for Graduate Education), Lisa Ruddick (Associate Professor, Dept. of English), Kristen Schilt (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Sociology), Eric Slauter (Associate Professor, Dept. of English and Director, Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture), and Hamza Walker (Curator, The Renaissance Society).

Fellows

Hillary Chute

Dr. Hillary Chute is a joint Professor between the Departments of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University. Dr. Chute (PhD, Rutgers), an expert on comics and graphic narratives, is the author or editor of six books. Her first, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia University Press, 2010), examines the work of five authors, including Marjane Satrapi, and Alison Bechdel, with whom she has collaborated (the two also co-taught a theory and practice seminar at the University of Chicago).

Formerly an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago, she is also the author of Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (University of Chicago Press, 2014), and Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard University Press, 2016). Her most recent title, Why Comics?: From Underground to Everywhere was published by HarperCollins in December 2017, and was named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus.

Chute is the Associate Editor of MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011) by Art Spiegelman, which won a National Jewish Book Award and an Eisner Award, and she is the co-editor, with Patrick Jagoda, of Comics & Media: A Critical Inquiry Book.  She has written for publications including Artforum, Bookforum, the New York Review of Books online, the Village Voice, The Believer, and Poetry. Chute has held research fellowships at the Harvard Society of Fellows, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College.

ALISON BECHDEL

For much of her thirty-year career, Alison Bechdel has skulked on the cultural margins, writing, drawing, and self-syndicating the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. That generational chronicle, “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period,” (Ms.) ran regularly in over fifty LGBT publications in North America and the UK. Many award-winning collections of Dykes were published in book form by an independent feminist press and were translated into several languages.