Carol Tilley will be a keynote speaker for the NASIG 32nd Annual Conference, which will be held June 8-11 in Indianapolis. An independent association of librarians and academic publishing professionals, NASIG promotes communication, information, and continuing education about scholarly communications, serials, and electronic resources. Her talk, "The Secret Life of Comics: Socializing and Seriality," will provide an overview of the past, present, and future of comics in libraries, giving special emphasis to the role of readers and fandom in making comics a relevant and exciting medium to collect and preserve.
Tilley also gave the keynote address for Monstrous Women in Comics: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Women in Comics and Graphic Novels, which took place May 25-27 at the University of North Texas. Her talk, "A Regressive Formula of Perversity: Fredric Wertham and the Monstrous Women of Comics," was a close reading of psychiatrist Wertham's descriptions and critiques of female comics characters in his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent. She shared new insights into his understanding of homosexuality and the ideas he drew from informants such as folklorist Gershon Legman and psychiatrist Hilde Mosse.
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 Frederic Wertham has been featured in The New York Times and other media outlets. An in-demand speaker on the history of comics readership and libraries, Tilley was a 2016 Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards judge and currently serves as vice-president/president-elect of the Comics Studies Society.