2025/03/01 by Oleg Benesch, Shaul Mitelpunkt, Charlotta Salmi · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Art #Comics and Graphic Narratives #Genealogy #History #Literature #Narrative
paper · doi:10.1093/ahr/rhae605
openalex publication_date 2025/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
Detail from Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga. In recent years, graphic narratives have gained greater recognition within the historical profession. University presses publish series of graphic histories, conferences include regular contributions from historians studying various kinds of sequential graphic narration, and an increasing number of historians are collaborating with artists in the production of graphic histories. In a profession struggling with job precarity, falling budgets, and the attacks of state officials, graphic narratives seem to represent reason for optimism: a medium through which historians might reach broader audiences, increase collaborations across industries, and support our work with students. While it is easy to notice the graphic boom in the historical profession, it is not so easy to fully comprehend its implications. In the Graphic Narratives and History project, we, a comics scholar and two historians, enter into conversation with dozens of scholars working on comics and history in various regional contexts to try and figure out the relationship between history and graphic narratives. As we thought about our approach to the project, we saw our role as that of convenors and facilitators; we wanted to learn from the many comics scholars and historians who have thought about the seam between history and comics for a long time. Our initial idea was to hold a plenary conversation on graphic histories and what academic historians can do with them before embarking on a range of regional conversations that examine questions of history and comics in a particular area of the world. In reality, conversations proved more fluid—regional examples were used in the plenary discussion, and the regional conversations contain insights on graphic narratives as a medium and historians’ relationship to that medium. What we have here, then, is not a polished nor a comprehensive almanac of history and comics, but rather an effort to take stock of what experts on graphic histories in various regions consider to be some of the most relevant questions about the relationship between graphic history and history. This first installment includes our first three conversations: a plenary discussion on comics and history, a conversation on comics and Latin American history, and a conversation on comics and North American history. Some of the questions we ask focus on the methodological end: What kind of history does the graphic narrative do? How do historians research, teach with, and produce graphic narratives, and how can we do it better? And how do scholars studying graphic narratives see the relationship between their work and history? By contrast, some of our other questions focus on the history of graphic narratives as a cultural industry: What can historians learn by paying close attention to the production, distribution, and consumption of comics? How have imperial and national contexts defined the production of graphic narratives? And how do these contexts still shape and constrain our approach and access to various kinds of graphic narratives? No definitive answers await here. Instead, this project compiles a series of conversations where scholars who have studied the problems of graphic narratives and history in various contexts share their expertise, ideas, how-to tips on teaching and research, and advice to historians who are interested in producing graphic histories. 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