Author of Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, graphic novelist Alison Bechdel is preoccupied with the overlap of the political and the personal spheres. While Dykes to Watch Out For was an explicitly community-based and politically engaged project, her deeply intimate memoirs about her father’s life before gay rights and her mother’s life before the women’s movement turn a microscopic lens on the internal mechanisms of oppression and liberation. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bechdel has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was adapted into an award-winning off Broadway play, and will open at Circle in the Square on Broadway this Spring.

Co-presented with the Institute for the Humanities, Institute for Research on Women & Gender, and the Zell Visiting Writers Series.

In conjunction with the Institute for the Humanities exhibition "Dykes, Dads, and Moms to Watch Out For: The Comics of Alison Bechdel", with an opening reception at the Institute for the Humanities gallery immediately following the lecture.