Illinois State University’s annual Lois Lenski Children’s Literature Lecture will feature Carol Tilley with a talk titled “A Severe Case of Comics: Looking Back at the Problem That Wasn’t.” Her talk will be at 7 p.m., Monday, March 21, in Stevenson Hall, room 101.
Tilley is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches courses on the readership of comics, media literacy, and youth services librarianship.
A nationally recognized expert on children’s comics and comic book history, Tilley’s research on comic archenemy Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent (1954), has been featured in The New York Times and will be a part of her presentation. Tilley has recently been awarded the Arnold O. Beckman Award for her current research project, “Children, Comics, and Print Culture: A Historical Investigation.”
Approaching comics from a variety of perspectives, Tilley’s scholarship has appeared in Children’s Literature in Education, Information & Culture: A Journal of History and The Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Her research focuses on the intersection of young people, comics, and libraries, particularly in the United States during the mid-20th century.
Tilley is affiliated with the Center for Children’s Books and the Center for Writing Studies, and is the co-editor of School Library Research. She earned a master’s of library science and a Ph.D. in information science from Indiana University.
The annual Lois Lenski Children’s Literature Lecture is co-sponsored by Illinois State’s Department of English and Milner Library. The presentation is open to the public. For additional information, contact Professor of English Jan Susina in the Department of English at (309) 438-3739.
