A prestigious campus award will allow Associate Professor Carol Tilley to expand her comics research through a new project, Children, Comics, and Print Culture – A Historical Investigation. The Campus Research Board has funded Tilley’s project in the amount of $19,036 and has designated the award as the Arnold O. Beckman Award. Only projects of special distinction or promise receive this designation.
The award will support travel for archival research and data collection and the assistance of two graduate students. The result of this work will be the publication of a monograph. According to the abstract:
Children, Comics, and Print Culture – A Historical Investigation . . . expands [Tilley’s] investigation of comics from the perspective of readers, a much-neglected group in both contemporary and historical research. Comics readership among young people peaked in the mid-20th century with levels reaching near 100%, yet there has been little scholarly investigation of this phenomenon. Funding for this project will enable archival research trips and hourly research support to complete data collection necessary for a single-author monograph that will provide a coherent examination of the social and cultural role of comics in United States’ children’s print culture throughout the twentieth century.
Tilley is a nationally known expert in comics readership and history and has worked with many of the comic-related archives and research collections in the U.S. Her research has focused on comics/youth engagement—historically and today—and the many factors that have influenced engagement, such as the role of librarians and educators. She has looked closely at the attitudes and practices of librarians, which may have impacted comics readership and certainly influenced access.
Tilley’s research has been published in several academic journals, including the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Information & Culture: A Journal of History, and Children’s Literature in Education. Her research on anti-comics advocate Fredric Wertham has been featured in The New York Times and other media outlets. At GSLIS, she teaches courses in comics reader’s advisory, media literacy, and youth services librarianship.