Paul Mitchell, recipient of the 2024 Margaret Fuller Scholarship, begins his research at the Instituto Franklin-UAH
On June 17th, 2024, Paul Mitchell, recipient of the 2024 Margaret Fuller scholarship, started his research stay at the Instituto Franklin UAH. For fifteen days, Paul Mitchell will develop the project “Gender in Autobio-graphical Illness Comics”.
This work analyzes how hegemonic gender codes are accepted and challenged in 21st Century comics from an academic perspective. Although detailed analyses on the works of female and male authors addressing diseases such as Parkinson’s have been conducted, the presence of gender in studies of comics about diseases has been neglected, ignoring the impact of culturally instilled female and male behaviors on the works of cartoonists.
Paul Mitchell is Director of the English Department at the Universidad Católica de Valencia (UCV) and Associate Professor accredited by ANECA. His current research focuses on representation of disease in autobiographical comics, emphasizing on how social constructions of gender influence graphic texts about personal experiences. He will use his stay at the Instituto Franklin-UAH to write a chapter of his next monograph about the representation of breast cancer by female cartoonists in relation with the concepts of liminal femininity and social alienation.
The Margaret Fuller Scholarship is a grant of €1.600 directed to members of AEDEAN in the field of American Studies. This scholarship is destined to young researchers as well as to established researchers that wish to widen or modify their line of research. Said scholarship is funded by the Instituto Franklin de la Universidad de Alcalá (UAH) and consists of a research stay at their facilities during the first half of July or September to research about the proposed topic.
You can find more information about this scholarship in the following link.