Hillary Chute lecture on visual memoirs by women Feb. 21

Hillary Chute, a professor at the University of Chicago, will discuss autobiographical comics by contemporary female authors and artists.  Chute’s presentation, “Repetition and Regeneration in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,” is sponsored by ISU’s English Department.  The lecture will be held Tuesday, Feb. 21 at 7 p.m. in Stevenson Hall, room 101, on the ISU campus and is open to the public.

“Comics may be what novels used to be — an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal,” Chute explained in a New York Times magazine article about the importance of graphic narratives.

Chute is a prominent scholar in the field of comics and graphic novels and the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. 

She is the associate editor for the critical study of Art Spiegelman’s landmark graphic novel MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic.  This spring, Chute and Bechdel, a 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Fun Home, will be co-teaching “Lines of Transmission: Comics and Autobiography” at the University of Chicago.

“I am interested in the ways people address history and understand their lives through cultural invention. My current teaching and research interests lie in contemporary American literature, specifically in how public and private histories take shape in the form of innovative narrative work,” Chute explained.

Chute has published essays about graphic narratives in PMLA, Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Village Voice and The Believer. She is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of English and a Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.