Drawing Women's Lives (Scholarship section)

Part 3. Information on panelists' and presider's scholarship, particularly scholarship that directly relates to the session topic

1) TAHNEER OKSMAN (panelist) is a graduate student in English Literature at the Graduate Center at CUNY, and is currently a Writing Fellow at Brooklyn College. Her dissertation, "Evidence of Carpentry: The Serial Selves of Jewish American Women Writers," focuses on the twentieth-century literature of first- and second-generation Jewish immigrant women, including Aline Kominsky-Crumb, examining issues of identity and assimilation, especially as related to intermarriage, in autobiographical and semiautobiographical texts. Her essay “Mourning in the Family Album," which explores images as vehicles for mourning in Nan Goldin's photo-journal The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Jan Oxenberg's film Thank You and Goodnight, is forthcoming in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

2) ROBYN WARHOL-DOWN (panelist) is Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University and has published widely on feminist theory and narrative form. Her books relevant to the panel include Feminisms (edited with Diane Price Herndl; Rutgers UP, 1991, 1997; updated version published as Feminisms Redux in 2009); Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Rutgers UP, 1989); and Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Popular Forms (Ohio State UP, 2003). Her current book project Is Narrative Refusals, a study of the "unnarratable" in fiction, a subject with which graphic narrative, especially graphic memoirs, often engage. In 2008 she participated in the MLA convention session "First-Person Graphic," sponsored by the Division on Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing, in which she explored the concept of "first-person graphic" in Bechdel's Fun Home, and her essay based on this paper is forthcoming in College Literature.

3) STACEY WEBER-FÈVE (panelist), Assistant Professor of French in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Iowa State University, specializes in French and Francophone cinema, primarily on women's contemporary filmmaking and life writing of France, Algeria, and Tunisia--a perspective directly relevant to Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical work, which is written and published in French (and now includes forays into film). Her book Re-Hybridizing Transnational Domesticity and Femininity: Women's Contemporary Filmmaking and Lifewriting in France, Algeria, and Tunisia was published this year (Lexington Books), and she has published essays on women's film in the French Review (2008) and the Quarterly Review of Film & Video (2010), as well as essays on pedagogy and writing in the French Review (2009) and Foreign Language Annals (2009).

4) HILLARY CHUTE (presider) is a Junior Fellow in Literature at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and will be Neubauer Family Assistant Professor the English Department at the University of Chicago starting in fall 2010. Chute's book Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics is forthcoming from Columbia UP's Gender and Culture series in October 2010, and directly addresses the subject of this proposed session; it examines five female cartoonists who each create nonfiction comics about their lives. Chute has published essays on comics in Twentieth-Century Literature (2006); American Periodicals (2007); Literature and Medicine (2007); PMLA (2008); MFS: Modern Fiction Studies (2008), where she additionally co-edited, in 2006, a special issue on Graphic Narrative with Marianne DeKoven; Women's Studies Quarterly (2008), in which she wrote about Satrapi's Persepolis for a special issue on Witness; and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2009). She is Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman's MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011) and a contributing editor to the Heath Anthology of American Literature (Contemporary Volume). She recently spoke about Alison Bechdel's Fun Home for the MLA radio program What's the Word?