In early June of this year, I found myself in Chicago for the “Cartooning the Medieval” symposium I had been designing and co-organizing with friend and colleague Christopher Fletcher at the Newberry Library. This project was born from a series of conversations between the two of us following a fantastic shared panel at the Medieval Academy of America conference in early 2023.

Our initial plan for the event (“what happens when you get cartoonists and medievalists in a room together”) gradually grew into the following:

This symposium will bring together medievalists and professional cartoonists to explore the potential of comics and narrative art to create new opportunities for diverse audiences outside academia to engage with medieval culture. By creating opportunities for conversation and collaboration between medieval scholars and professional cartoonists, this symposium will identify the interpretive spaces intentionally and unintentionally created by medieval sources, and imagine how comics can fill those spaces in ways that illuminate, explain, and provide access to the medieval past.

This event is part of the celebration of the Centennial of the Medieval Academy of America in 2025, and was generously co-sponsored by the Academy through a Centennial Grant. The symposium unrolled over two days, opening with a keynote discussion between Chris and I and Patrick Murphy, another medievalist/cartoonist (when his “History of the English Language” graphic novel hits the shelves, you are going to want to read it – trust me!) followed by a drinks reception. The following day was packed with activities, including an extended icebreaker designed to get both disciplines in conversation right from the start, a hands-on book history and manuscript viewing session for the cartoonists and a zine workshop for the medievalists, a series of artists talks from our three embedded cartoonists (Lucy Bellwood, Marnie Galloway, and Chris Schweizer), and a session of collaborative work with facsimiles of items from the Newberry collection and a wide array of drawing supplies provided at each table.

I want to conclude this post with the words that Marnie Galloway closed her artist’s talk with:

“To everyone in the room, I also want to invoke a call to action, medievalists and cartoonists alike. I invite all of you to draw more. Draw your ideas and questions, draw what you had for breakfast, draw the weirdest panels in the medieval manuscripts, draw the trees outside. The act of drawing is just as much an act of thinking as writing prose scholarship. It is anti-pretentious and can be deeply intellectual, and is part of a long history of people sitting at desks illuminating manuscripts, trying to decode the heavens and the meaning of it all. We are a part of that too.”

Marnie’s closing call to action makes more bold my own desire/inclination to invite people into both of my disciplines. It is this desire, in part, that planted the seed of the Newberry event. As a Chaucerian, I want these texts to feel inviting and accessible, even in Middle English, and I happen to think marrying comics to Chaucer is one excellent way into this self-set task. This was my inspiration to introduce cartoonists to professional medievalists and their scholarly work: I was hoping connections might be made that would bring more comics inspired by and even adapting medieval texts into the world.

There’s more to it than just that, though. It turns out that making comics also helps me to think through my reading and my research. It’s slow work and allows lots of time for reflection and mind-wandering as the lines pile up and images take shape. Marnie absolutely nailed this quality above: “The act of drawing is just as much an act of thinking as writing prose scholarship. It is anti-pretentious and can be deeply intellectual”. Drawing is an act of thinking and it’s the particular form that my practice-based research takes. This facet was the inspiration behind introducing medievalists to cartooning and to cartoonists: I hoped more of them might experiment with making drawings of their own and also collaborating with cartoonists on projects that could bring their brilliant medieval scholarship to a broader audience. “Anti-pretentious and deeply intellectual” sounds like exactly what we as an academic community could use a bit more of.

This project will not end with this symposium, which is lovely news for me! In September, we announced the creation of the Newberry Medieval Minicomic Prize: two mini-grants aimed at emerging cartoonists interested in engaging with the medieval in their comics work. This prize will provide funding to help offset printing costs as well as mentorship and support from Chris and the opportunity to have the winning works featured in Newberry publications, added to the Newberry’s collections and offered for sale in the Newberry bookstore.  We received nearly 50 submissions and will be announcing the winners soon. As far as I know, there’s not another award quite like this and we are truly excited to see what new works this prize helps to bring into the world. We have also pitched an article for an academic journal on the subject and are designing a workshop on collaboration, community, and public engagement for conferences coming up next year. Initial planning for a follow-up event in 2027 is also in the works. Until then, if you would like to read a bit more about the event, I offer the following links:

https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2025/08/06/medievalists-meet-cartoonists-cartooning-the-medieval-at-the-newberry-library/  Medievalist postdoctoral fellow Anne Le wrote a blog post with lots of details and photos of the symposium.

https://pencilbooth.com/takes/c539c006-b689-4795-920b-db91fab7687f Cartoonist Eli Estrella Pérez also shared details and photos from the symposium, offering a cartoonist-eye-view of the event.

Do you work for an organization or institution that might be interesting in hosting an event along these lines or something similarly collaborative and unexpected? Please use the contact form on my website to get in touch: I look forward to hearing from you!