Featuring a clearer focus on connecting the different disciplines that study illustration, this year’s Illustration, Comics and Animation Conference — the College’s third annual — welcomed more than 20 scholars and artists to Hanover this weekend, event organizer and English professor Michael Chaney wrote in an email. Events at the conference, held primarily in Haldeman Center, ranged from a book festival on Friday to a Saturday evening banquet in the Hanover Inn.
“I think it was a success on both counts,” Chaney said, referencing the conference’s dual goals of providing students with a pedagogical experience and catalyzing new scholarship. “My students never let me down whenever it comes to matters of intellectual performance — they asked questions that were critical and engaging, and the scholars felt a real energy.”
At many of the conference’s sessions, undergraduates at the College were able to mingle with visiting scholars and faculty, who traveled from as far as Louisiana and Georgia to participate. The conference also drew on local resources in the Upper Valley, including participation from the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, whose students provided work for Friday’s book festival.
“This was another opportunity to bring Dartmouth and the Center for Cartoon Studies together,” James Sturm, the center’s co-founder and a Friday panelist, said.
At the Friday Book Festival, attendees had the opportunity to view and purchase work by students at the Center for Cartoon Studies, which offers two-year master of fine arts degrees, as well as one- and two-year certificates in cartooning and summer workshops. In between the festival’s sessions, Harper College English professor Brian Cremins and Harvard University comparative literature professor Nhora Lucía Serrano — both executive board members of the newly formed Comics Studies Society — moderated a panel with Sturm and Dartmouth studio art professor Enrico Riley.
Cremins, who also attended the conference’s inaugural year, said that the book festival in particular impressed him at this year’s conference.
“It was really exciting and, for me, brought in an entirely new energy because it balanced the scholars who were there with working artists,” Cremins said. “It was a wonderful expansion of the initial idea [of the first conference], which was already interdisciplinary to begin with.”
On Saturday — the conference’s most-scheduled day — attendees were treated to five sessions, ranging from a roundtable on utilitarianism in the work of Noah Berlatsky to a panel on “Crossing Comics Cultures,” with the latter including remarks from Dartmouth French and Italian professor Annabelle Cone, who said that she viewed the conference as an excellent opportunity to “test the waters” with a paper she will give at an international conference later this year.
“Just the fact that you’re presenting it in public, and you hear yourself reading your work, you hear things you didn’t hear before,” she said.
On its last day, the conference featured a final session titled “Comics, Constructions and Collections,” with remarks from Dartmouth film and media studies professor Paul Young.
Reflecting on the conference, several participants and organizers interviewed reminisced on how far cartooning has come as an academic discipline and culturally relevant practice in the last decade. Cremins said that he “could not have imagined” as an undergraduate that the College would one day play host to a conference devoted to comics, and Sturm added that these conferences reflect the rising cultural recognition of the form.
“Ten years ago, the idea of a cartooning school seemed really odd to people,” Sturm said. “The fact that Harvard dissertations are being done in comics and that Ivy League schools like Dartmouth are having animation and cartooning conferences really goes to show how far comics have come.”
In addition to Chaney and Cremins, administrative assistant Kelly Palmer, English professor Jeff Sharlet and research librarian Laura Braunstein played important roles in helping the conference come to fruition, Chaney wrote in an email.
“Although I’m exhausted, I suddenly can’t wait to do it again,” he wrote.
