American Studies Colloquium Series
April 3: Gatekeeping, Paranoid Professionalism, and Redefining Literacy: How US Librarians Fought, Found, and Loved Comic Books
March 20, 2025
We are pleased to invite you to the third lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester! In this talk, we will look at how US librarians fought against comic books as though libraries were the last line of defense in a vital war. We will examine the existential threat that librarians perceived comics to pose in the mid-century and the gradual, nervous thawing of that opposition in the 1970s and 1980s.