Having trouble viewing this email? Click here to view it online.
USC University of Southern California
 
The Levan Institute for the Humanities hosts Book Chats, monthly conversations celebrating new books by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.  

Comics and Stuff

Thursday, March 11 | 12:00 PM | REGISTER
Book Chats—Henry Jenkins, Comics and Stuff

  • Discussants: Hillary Chute (Northeastern University) and Daniel Miller (University College London),
  • Moderator:  Tara McPherson (USC)
About the Book:
Comics and Stuff consider how comics display our everyday stuff—junk drawers, bookshelves, attics—as a way into understanding how we represent ourselves now. For most of their history, comics were widely understood as disposable—you read them and discarded them, and the pulp paper they were printed on decomposed over time. Today, comic books have been rebranded as graphic novels—clothbound high-gloss volumes that can be purchased in bookstores, checked out of libraries, and displayed proudly on bookshelves. They are reviewed by serious critics and studied in university classrooms. A medium once considered trash has been transformed into a respectable, if not elite, genre. Comics and Stuff moves through anthropology, material culture, literary criticism, and art history to resituate comics in the cultural landscape. Through over one hundred full-color illustrations, using close readings of contemporary graphic novels, Jenkins explores how comics depict stuff and exposes the central role that stuff plays in how we curate our identities, sustain memory, and make meaning. MORE
About the Author:
Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education and primary investigator for the Civic Paths Research Group at the University of Southern California. The author or editor of 20 books on media and popular culture, Henry Jenkins has spent his career exploring the intersections between participatory culture, participatory learning and participatory politics.

Upcoming Book Chats

Thursday, April 15 | 12:00 PM
Book Chats—Lisa Cooper Vest, Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music

A discussion of Lisa Cooper Vest's recent book, Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music (University of California Press, 2020). The author will be joined in conversation by Joy Calico (Vanderbilt University) and Peter Schmelz (Arizona State University), moderated by Paul Lerner (USC). MORE
View the Campus Humanities Calendar
USC Dornsife | Los Angeles, CA 90089 US
This email was sent to usclevan@dornsife.usc.edu. To ensure that you continue receiving our emails,
please add us to your address book or safe list.

manage your preferences
opt out if you no longer want to receive USC Dornsife E-Communications
Got this as a forward? Sign up to receive our future emails.