Associate Professor Carol Tilley will speak this Saturday, August 13, at the Comics & Fandom Fest in Urbana, hosted by The Urbana Free Library (TUFL) and other local sponsors. Events will be held at the library and around town throughout the day. Tilley will give a presentation on great women in comics at 4:00 p.m. in the Lewis Auditorium at TUFL.
In addition to formal presentations, people of all ages are invited to attend in costume, play board games, take a lesson in medieval combat, work on their illustration skills, and more. Recent iSchool graduate Damian Duffy (PhD ’16) will speak at 11:00 a.m. in the Lewis Auditorium on how to turn your ideas into comics.
At the iSchool, Tilley teaches courses in comics reader’s advisory, media literacy, and youth services librarianship. Part of her 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.