Thanks to research conducted by Associate Professor Carol Tilley, the work of one of the most influential anti-comics voices has been debunked. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s evidence of the negative effects of comic readership on young people hasn’t been taken seriously by scholars in decades, but a new discovery by Tilley shows that even when Wertham’s claims were taken as fact by many—in the 1940s and 1950s—a small but vocal group was already questioning his methods.

Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke is one of three winners of the 2016 Kenneth and Sylvia Marantz Fellowship for Picturebook Research, which encourages scholars from the United States and abroad to make use of resources available at the Marantz Picturebook Collection for the Study of Picturebook Art in their research.

Sayan Bhattacharyya, HathiTrust Research Center postdoctoral research associate, will speak during a panel titled, “What Do Comparative Literature and Digital Humanities Have To Say To Each Other? A Critical Approach,” which he co-organized, at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association.

Every month, Google alone fields billions of search requests. The staggering demand for information, coupled with the exponentially growing amount of information available, means that reliable search results are key to maneuvering a flooded information landscape. Associate Professor Miles Efron is among the leading scholars investigating ways to improve search. With funded research projects…

A new book by alumnus David Hunter (PhD '89), The Lives of George Frideric Handel, is part biography and part genre case study. The famous composer’s life has been documented in numerous biographies, which Hunter scrutinized to differentiate history from interpretation. His findings led to this new work, which was published recently by Boydell Press.

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak will travel to the United Arab Emirates in March to take part in a workshop at New York University’s Abu Dhabi Institute. “Charisma of the Book: Global Perspectives for the 21st Century,” will be held March 12-14.

Assistant Professor Emily Knox will participate in a panel discussion on “Libraries and Public Access to Books” at the Tucson Festival of Books on Saturday, March 12. Knox and fellow experts will explore the topic of information access and the ways libraries have shaped conversations surrounding issues of access.

William H. Dutton, Quello Professor of Media and Information Policy at Michigan State University, will deliver the Spring 2016 Windsor Lecture at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, March 14, in GSLIS Room 126. His lecture is titled, "Information Power Shifts and the Fifth Estate." A reception will be held in the GSLIS east foyer immediately following the lecture.

The Center for Children’s Books will host the 2016 Gryphon Lecture on Friday, March 11. The annual lecture, which is free and open to campus and the public, features a leading scholar in the field of youth and literature, media, and culture. Denise Agosto, GSLIS research fellow and professor in Drexel University’s College of Computing & Informatics, will deliver this year’s lecture

Illinois English professor Ted Underwood wants to know how the language describing male and female characters in works of fiction has changed since the late eighteenth century. He’s using data mining tools to gather information from thousands of books to answer that question.