Lucy is, of course, Lucy Shelton Caswell, original curator of The Billy Ireland.
Lucy with current curator Jenny Robb
The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum (BICLM) is pleased to announce the winners of the annual Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award for 2022. As a result of postponing the 2021 award due to COVID, we were able to provide two awards for 2022. The award is named for Professor Emerita Lucy Shelton Caswell, the founding curator of BICLM, and provides $2500 to support researchers who need to travel to Columbus, Ohio to use the BICLM collections materials on site.
The recipients for 2022 are Adrienne Resha and Eike Exner.
Adrienne Resha is a Ph.D. student at the College of William and Mary. She will be researching race, color and printing technology, combining “color theory and critical race theory to articulate a critical color theory in original comic books” for her dissertation, From Superman to Sana Amanat: Alienation, Assimilation, and American Superhero Comics, 1938 to Present. Her time at BICLM will be used to closely study original printings of Silver, Bronze and modern age comics – with a special focus on Green Lantern comics and the character John Stewart, to “observe how race was produced in mainstream comics before digital coloring became the industry norm in the 1980s.”
Eike Exner received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and is now an independent scholar. His revised dissertation, Comics and the Origins of Manga, was recently published by Rutgers University Press. He will be researching representations of women in pre-war manga for a book chapter in an anthology on women and manga and for a book-length history of modern manga.