Italian Comics: A Century Long (Hi)story

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course offers an introduction to Italian comics and aims to explore their interaction with the historical and social contexts in which they are published. Italian comics have a history of power exchange among consumers, industry, and products, and thus, are particularly suitable for investigating how the Italian people reacted to significant 20th- and 21st-century historical events. This course will provide students with fundamental coordinates to read, interpret, and argue about comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels contextually as social commentary and products of the entertainment industry. Students will have the chance to develop critical thinking skills and multimodal literacy with activities such as visual analyses of digitized comics pages, evaluations of physical copies of magazines and books, discussions on the role of comics artists, and broader considerations on the change and development of Italian society and culture. This course will utilize the vast selection of Italian comics held at the Regenstein Library.