Join us for a virtual conversation with author and illustrator Art Spiegelman, who created the Pulitzer Prize winning Holocaust narrative Maus, portraying Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The book weaves Spiegelman's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into a retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. The book offers an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma. 

Art Spiegelman will share images from Maus and discuss how they relate to today’s context at home and around the world. Following the presentation, audience members are invited to participate in a Q&A session with the author. 

Sponsored by the Dr. Harold Abel Endowed Lecture Series in the Study of Dictatorship, Democracy and Genocide and the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Critical Engagements initiative.

About Art Spiegelman

Having rejected his parents’ aspirations for him to become a dentist, Art Spiegelman studied cartooning in high school and began drawing professionally at age 16. He went on to study art and philosophy at Harpur College. As creative consultant for Topps Bubble Gum Co. from 1965-1987, Spiegelman created Wacky Packages, Garbage Pail Kids and other novelty items. He taught history and aesthetics of comics at the School for Visual Arts in New York from 1979-1986. In 2007 he was a Heyman Fellow of the Humanities at Columbia University where he taught a Masters of the Comics seminar. In 1980, Spiegelman founded RAW, the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine, with his wife, Françoise Mouly. Maus was originally serialized in the pages of RAW. He and Mouly more recently co-edited Little Lit, a series of three comics anthologies for children, and publish a series of early readers called Toon Books—picture books in comics format. In 2011, Spiegelman won the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, marking only the third time an American has received the honor. In 2018 he received the Edward MacDowell Medal, the first-ever Edward MacDowell Medal given in comic art. 

Autism is an extraordinarily contested condition. To some, it is a devastating disease; to others, it is a valued aspect of identity. Young people growing up with an autism spectrum diagnosis face the task of reconciling these two seemingly incompatible understandings of their condition, in the context of their own developing identities. How do they do it, and what can we learn from their creativity and wisdom?

Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork with youth on the autism spectrum, their families, and the professionals who work with them, this talk will explore the way people affected by autism spectrum conditions negotiate the meanings of these diagnoses in the spaces where they live, work, play, and love in their everyday lives. Medicalized understandings of autism as damaging disease or as hardwired neurogenetic identity are insufficient to capture the full meanings of autism as it is lived – the way it brings both vulnerability and strength, creates both alienation and community, and constitutes the self while also profoundly disrupting it. Instead, youth on the spectrum draw on an alternative shared mythology out of fantasy literature, video games and other speculative fictions to conceptualize their condition, re-envisioning themselves as mutant, hybrid, permeable creatures. In doing so, they invite us to transcend the limitations of our bounded bodies, imagining a broader and more inclusive conception of what it means to be ourselves. 

Elizabeth Fein is an assistant professor of psychology at Duquesne University and author of Living on the Spectrum: Autism and Youth in Community (NYU Press, 2020). A licensed clinical psychologist and psychological anthropologist, she is the co-editor of Autism in Translation: An Intercultural Conversation on Autism Spectrum Conditions (Palgrave, 2018). Her presentation is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Critical Engagements initiative.

Our first featured event for Critical Engagements is the virtual opening of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls exhibition at the Ziibiwing Center on September 25, 2020. Information is below.