Associate Professor Carol Tilley has been elected second vice president of the Comics Studies Society (CSS) in the organization’s first election since its founding in 2014. As Tilley moves through the roles of second vice president (effective immediately), first vice president (2017-2018), president (2018-2019), and past president, she will be the first person elected to those roles by the full membership.
CSS is the first professional association for comics scholars in the United States, open to researchers and teachers “who share the goals of promoting the critical study of comics, improving comics teaching, and engaging in open and ongoing conversations about the comics world.” The group currently boasts five hundred members representing more than two dozen countries.
At GSLIS, Tilley teaches courses in comics reader’s advisory, media literacy, and youth services librarianship. She is a faculty affiliate in the Center for Children’s Books and Center for Writing Studies at Illinois. In addition to her newly-elected role with CSS, Tilley is a member of the 2016 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards judging panel and is the director of external relations for the Association for Library and Information Science Education.
Part of Tilley’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of young people, comics, and libraries, particularly in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. Her research has been published in journals including the Journal of the Association 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 was featured in The New York Times and other media outlets.