Category: Activities

Come on Thursday 29 to Het Pand and get in the crowd to witness Eva Van de Wiele defend her thesis, Building a Glocalised Serial for Children: Corriere dei Piccoli (1908-1923) and TBO (1917-1932), and take part in the ensuing joyful celebrations.

Thesis abstract

Practical info

On 30 September we are organizing at Het Pand a study day on transnational circulations and influences in comics. Through six case studies, we will look at particular ways of adaptation, domestication, repurposing, and other types of transnational circulation in comics, both in Europe and the Americas. Each lecture will be followed by a short reaction from a respondent, and a Q&A with the audience.

Download the program.

Program

9:30 Welcome & Coffee

Practical info

Convention Center Het Pand,

Onderbergen 1, 9000 Ghent

room Oude Infirmerie

Register using this link before Monday 26 September.

“Redrawing photos: comics as a medium to read the family album”, presentation by María José Suárez

Tuesday 5 July at 11 AM — Room 1.12 (Blandijnberg)

On Tuesday morning, María José Suárez, who has been an intern with the comics team for the past two months, will present the research for her MA thesis at EESI (Angoulême):

“As photography has been used as a reference for comic book authors almost from the beginning, this project aims to understand what happens when they use pictures from the family album. For this, I put myself in the experiment of drawing from this type of photos to make a dialogue with different authors that have done the same.”

“The Comics Reader and the Neoliberal Novel: Contemporary Debates on Cultural Value”, talk by Christopher Pizzino

Tuesday 5 July at 2 PM — Library Lab Magnel (Faculteitsbibliotheek Letteren en Wijsbegeerte)

Many different constituents seem unhappy with comics in the United States, from literary critics who dismiss them as neoliberal to fans who attack them as too “woke.” But where are these discontented readers located, where are comics in relation to literature, and can we find better ways to read comics–as fans and as critics–in the neoliberal era?

Christopher Pizzino is Associate Professor of Contemporary US Literature at the University of Georgia, and Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of English at George Mason University. He teaches literary and genre theory, image theory, comics studies, and various genres of contemporary fiction, film, comics, and television.

Talk open to everyone — to request reading materials, please write to benoit.crucifix@ugent.be

Commonly drawn for children, comics have a particular link to lines drawn by children. Since at least Rodolphe Töpffer, who in 1848 praised the “liveliness of movement” of the little men doodled in the margins, children’s drawings have been regularly admired by cartoonists. And as comics and graphic culture started to proliferate in the pages of mass-printed magazines, so did children’s drawing grow into an object of new attention and discourses, caught between pedagogues, psychologists, painters and writers. This research workshop gather various international researchers and practicioners around the intersections and interactions between comics and children’s drawings, opening a vast field of inquiry. These two days will take us from school boards to juvenile delinquency institutions, from adult cartoonists drawing ‘as’ children to children cartoonists drawing ‘as’ adults, from twentieth-century pedagogy to contemporary practice-based research, from cartooning contests to contemporary kids’ fanzines, from personal archives to found treasures. Full program is available here.

Souvent dessinée pour les enfants, la bande dessinée entretient un lien particulier au dessin d’enfant. Depuis au moins Rodolphe Töpffer, qui déjà en 1848 louait la « vivacité du mouvement » des petits bonshommes griffonnés dans les marges, le dessin d’enfant a souvent été une source d’admiration pour les dessinateurs et dessinatrices. Et tandis que la bande dessinée et la culture graphique s’installait dans les pages des nouveaux imprimés produits en masse, le dessin d’enfant lui devenait un objet de nouvelles attentions et de nouveaux discours, cerné entre pédagogues, psychologues, peintres et écrivains. Cet atelier de recherche rassemble des chercheuses et chercheurs de différents pays autour des nombreuses intersections et interactions entre bande dessinée et dessins d’enfants, ouvrant un vaste chantier de recherche. Ces deux journées nous amèneront des pupitres scolaires aux institutions de surveillance de la jeunesse, d’adultes dessinant comme des enfants à des enfants dessinant comme des adultes, de la psychopédagogie vingtième-siècle à la recherche-action contemporaine, des concours de dessin d’hier aux fanzines pour enfants d’aujourd’hui, d’archivelles personnelles à des trésors retrouvés. Le programme complet est disponible ici.

 

Workshop organized by Benoît Crucifix and Maaheen Ahmed, and featuring Yassine de Vos, Mathias Gardet, Xavier Girard, Breixo Harguindey, Dragana Radanović, Johanna Schipper, Daniel Silvestre, Carol Tilley, Nancy Vansieleghem, Aleksandar Zograf — and, online, Shiamin Kwa, Emma Hunsinger and Tillie Walden.

 

 

If you want to attend this workshop, please register before May 20 by noon, through this online form. Pour vous souhaitez participer à l’atelier, veuillez compléter ce formulaire avant le 20 mai, heure de midi.

13 May 2022, Faculteitsbibliotheek Letteren en Wijsgebeerte, Library Lab Magnel

10:30-12:00 Popular Serial Narratives: Genre Politics and Periodical Histories

Workshop with Prof. Daniel Stein (Siegen)

12:00-13:30 Lunch break

13:30-14:30 Alain Van Passen collection visit

14:45-16:15 Sérialités médiatiques et iconotextuelles, le périodique de bande dessinée

Talk by Prof. Matthieu Letourneux (Paris Nanterre)

No registration required!

To obtain the reading materials required for Prof. Stein’s workshop, please e-mail Maaheen Ahmed (maaheen.ahmed@ugent.be)

31 March 2021, 08:30-9:45 — Blandijn, 2nd floor, room 2.25

Talk by Lorenzo Di Paola, University of Messina/University of Salerno

The Corriere dei Piccoli was born at a particular moment in Italian history, between old systems of literary communication and the blossoming of new factors that were transforming the national cultural scene thanks to the advent of new industrial technologies and new cultural logics. This paper aims to investigate the communication format of this famous periodical in which national cultural models and international leisure models began to coexist and circulate, capable of breaking down the rigid boundaries of Italian literary culture and habitual pedagogical and monumental figures of the late nineteenth century. A new family scene of entertainment was thus created in a formula in which (the great names of the first Italian comics, Antonio Rubino, Attilio Mussino, Sergio Tofano, and others) an evident co-participation in their own historical time – thanks to the connections with Art Nouveau, Futurism, cinema – and the remediation of a long cultural tradition – the illustration of the figurine makers, satire, the spectacle of the storytellers – were intertwined. The proposed analysis therefore includes

– a focus on the social and perceptive revolution that accompanied the Corriere dei Piccoli;

– an investigation into the imagery and media narratives that nourished the magazine;

– an overview of the major authors of the Corriere dei Piccoli‘s auroral phase;

– readings and the critical fortunes of the periodical.

Bio

Lorenzo Di Paola is research fellow at the Department of Ancient and Modern Civilisations, University of Messina. He is adjunct professor of “Teorie e sociologie del fumetto dalla stampa al digitale ” at the University of Salerno. He cooperates with the chairs of Sociology of Cinema and Audiovisuals, Digital Media and Sociology of the Imaginary at the University of Salerno. He works on the mediology of comics and literature and the sociology of digital cultures. He has written numerous articles for scientific journals and collective volumes, and has participated in numerous national and international conferences. He is part of the international research group on Italian comics SNIF – Studying ‘n’ Investigating Fumetti, and is a member of the “Centro Studi Media Culture Società” at the University of Salerno. He also co-edits the scientific series “L’Eternauta, Collana di studi su fumetti e media”, together with Luigi Frezza and Mario Tirino. He has edited with Mario Tirino the volume Poi piovve dentro a l’alta fantasia. Dante e i fumetti (Polidoro Editore 2022). His most recent publications include: From Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality: Devices, Bodies, Places and Relationships (Ismar-adjunct 2021); L’immaginazione al potere (Oedipus 2020); Alla ricerca di una nuova identità disciplinare. Il fumetto e la transdisciplinarità (Mediascapes Journal, 2019). He is the author of the book L’inafferrabile medium. Una cartografia delle teorie del fumetto dagli anni venti a oggi (Polidoro editore, 2019).

3 March 2021, 11:30-12:30 — Blandijn, first floor, Faculteitszaal

Talk by Lorenzo Di Paola, University of Messina/University of Salerno

Comics are a very particular medium capable of living between the fragile boundaries that separate the various media narratives. A sort of media nomadism is what feeds and best describes the vital processes of this medium, which has always remediated previous and contemporary media (remediation that has had and still has very strong influences on formal and narrative aspects, on ‘contact’ with the public and on reading protocols). The web and digital technologies have not only somehow reconfigured forms of work, modes of production and consumption, but have also impacted the semiotic and spatial structures of comics and their reading modes. In this lecture, we will try to investigate these factors through the analysis of the Italian webcomic To be Continued by Lorenzo Ghetti and the web experience of Zerocalcare. Moreover, comics remain a fertile ground for investigating the dynamics that contribute to creating that ‘conception of the world’ capable of orienting the experiences and the emotional experience of entire generations. Through these two authors, therefore, we will try to understand how and with what contribution shared places and memory repertories, symbolic contents and narratives contribute to creating that common sense, that value system that allows mutual recognition among the members of the same generation.

Bio

Lorenzo Di Paola is research fellow at the Department of Ancient and Modern Civilisations, University of Messina. He is adjunct professor of “Teorie e sociologie del fumetto dalla stampa al digitale ” at the University of Salerno. He cooperates with the chairs of Sociology of Cinema and Audiovisuals, Digital Media and Sociology of the Imaginary at the University of Salerno. He works on the mediology of comics and literature and the sociology of digital cultures. He has written numerous articles for scientific journals and collective volumes, and has participated in numerous national and international conferences. He is part of the international research group on Italian comics SNIF – Studying ‘n’ Investigating Fumetti, and is a member of the “Centro Studi Media Culture Società” at the University of Salerno. He also co-edits the scientific series “L’Eternauta, Collana di studi su fumetti e media”, together with Luigi Frezza and Mario Tirino. He has edited with Mario Tirino the volume Poi piovve dentro a l’alta fantasia. Dante e i fumetti (Polidoro Editore 2022). His most recent publications include: From Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality: Devices, Bodies, Places and Relationships (Ismar-adjunct 2021); L’immaginazione al potere (Oedipus 2020); Alla ricerca di una nuova identità disciplinare. Il fumetto e la transdisciplinarità (Mediascapes Journal, 2019). He is the author of the book L’inafferrabile medium. Una cartografia delle teorie del fumetto dagli anni venti a oggi (Polidoro editore, 2019).

Nicolas Verstappen, lecturer at the Faculty of Communication Arts, Chulalongkorn University, will come on Wednesday 5th January to give a talk on children characters in Thai comics. He is the author of a recent first English-language historical overview of comics in Thailand, The Art of Thai Comics. The talk will take place at Blandijnberg 2, room 1.11.

Our colleague Giorgio Busi Rizzi organizes a conference on digital comics which will take place in Ghent next summer, 11 to 13 July 2022: Comics Strike Back: Digital Comics, Digital Audiences, Digital Practices:

Read the full call for papers and visit the conference website here: https://www.digitalcomics.ugent.be/