The Faculties of Education, MMLL and FAMES are running a seminar series dedicated to graphic narratives in 2023-2024.
Program of events for Easter Term 2024:
Thursday May 2: TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History: Book presentation and discussion with Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee
15:30-17:00, London time. Alison Richard Building, Room S2. Zoom access will be provided to attendees who request it ahead of time.
Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee discuss their recent graphic novel TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (Verso, 2023). The end of slavery started in what was then San Domingo. In 1791, the enslaved people of the most prized French sugar plantation colony revolted against their masters. For over twelve years, against a backdrop of the French Revolution, they fought an epic Black liberation struggle for control of the island. Theirs was the first and only successful slave revolution. It was the creation of Haiti as a nation, the first independent Black republic outside of Africa, and an international inspiration to the persecuted and enslaved. This is the impassioned and beautifully drawn story of the Haitian Revolution and its incredible leader: Toussaint Louverture. The text of this graphic novel is a play by C. L. R. James that opened in London in 1936 with Paul Robeson in the title role. For the first time, Black actors appeared on the British stage in a work by a black playwright. The script had been lost for almost seventy years when a draft copy was discovered. Now this extraordinary drama has been reimagined in graphic form.
Sakina Karimjee has a background in theatre; set and costume design, production and draughting, working for companies such as Royal Opera House, National Theatre, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Nottingham Playhouse and Theatre by the Lake. More recently, she has turned her attention to adapting graphic novels, using her visual skills and understanding of storytelling to communicate with a reader rather than audience.
Nic Watts is an illustrator, creating artwork for numerous fiction and non-fiction projects for both children and adults. His work ranges from illustrating children's books such as Stanley Bones and the Great Dinosaur Mystery (Little Tiger Press & Grund), to working with UK based charities including NSPCC and FPA and for newspapers such as The Guardian.
Thursday 23 May 2024, 14:00-17:00. Lecture theatre, Paula Browne House, Murray Edwards College.
Concluding comics workshop, with presentations:
Armelle Blin-Rolland (Bangor): Bande dessinée, ecoliteracy, environmental justice
Barbara Spadaro (Liverpool): Comics and graphic novels in the (languages) curriculum: memory, mobility and translation
Alexandra Lloyd (Oxford): Encountering difficult histories in German-language comics.
For further details, please contact the seminar organisers: Charles Forsdick (crf41@cam.ac.uk), Yaron Peleg (yp240@cam.ac.uk) and Joe Sutliff Sanders (jcs217@cam.ac.uk)
Previous seminars:
Friday March 8 2024
Laurence Grove (University of Glasgow), “The canon is dead: long live the comic canon.”
Have the chronological lists of Great Books upon which the university syllabus used to depend all but disappeared? If so when, how and why did this happen? Drawing upon the specific example of Comics Studies, Grove addresses these questions whilst suggesting the notion of Personal Journey Criticism.
Laurence Grove is Professor of French and Text/Image Studies and Director of the Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Text/Image Cultures at the University of Glasgow.
Wednesday March 13 2024
Yirmi Pinkus (Shenkar College of Art and Design), "The Noah Books project: from modern Hebrew classics to contemporary comics for children.”
Noah Books Publishers, founded about a decade ago by the acclaimed Israeli illustrators Rutu Modan and Yirmi Pinkus, is an experimental project that focuses on locating narrative texts from the inventory of modern Hebrew children literature and turning them into comic books for young readers. The books are created in a sort of artistic lab, in close collaboration with young illustrators, graduates of design academies. The encounter between the classics and the comics genre explores new interpretations by using contemporary visual storytelling and have been translated into English and Chinese.
Yirmi Pinkus is a novelist and illustrator. His picture book Mr. Fibber, based on stories by acclaimed Israeli poet Lea Goldberg, was awarded the Israel Museum illustration award. Pinkus is a professor of illustration at the Shenkar College of Art and Design, Tel Aviv.
