Read Together: Cartoonist Spotlight on Emily Carroll with Ayanni Cooper
Starting May 2, 2024
Ayanni Cooper Brings You 4 Weeks of Intensive Comics Study
At A Glance
When: May 2 to May 23, 2024
Weekly Meetings Thursday 7PM to 9PM
Where: Online via Zoom
Level: Beginner to Intermediate
Cost: $149-199
Materials: See below for required course texts
Learn From Reading Comics Closely
Take a guided deep-dive into the bibliography of acclaimed horror cartoonist Emily Carroll in a 4-week course taught by comic scholar, Dr. Ayanni Cooper.
Each week, we will explore a different text of Carroll’s—including her long-form works, born-digital creations, and collaborative endeavors—to study how she deploys color, clutter, character design, and other tactics to tell her hair-raising tales.
Through close consideration of her comics, students will uncover tactics related to different modalities, page construction, and narrative pacing that they can deploy in their own creations.
Because the texts featured in the class are horror, please be aware that there will be some content that readers may find unsettling. Please be sure to look into the individual texts featured for appropriate content warnings.
In Detail
Week 1: Thursday May 2, 2024 7PM to 9PM Eastern/4PM to 6PM Pacific
Week 2: Thursday May 9, 2024 7PM to 9PM Eastern/4PM to 6PM Pacific
Week 3: Thursday May 16, 2024 7PM to 9PM Eastern/4PM to 6PM Pacific
Week 4: Thursday May 23, 2024 7PM to 9PM Eastern/4PM to 6PM Pacific
Calls will include live discussion and exercises.
Class videos, audios, chats and transcripts will be saved and archived.
This course includes a Mighty Network component for students to join conversation outside of live calls.
Course Texts Include:
Week 1 - Selections from Through the Woods (2014) and selections from EmCarroll.com (2010-2023) (Texts provided)
Week 2 - Speak: The Graphic Novel (2018) (Students must obtain)
Week 3 - When I Arrived in the Castle (2019) (Text provided)
Week 4 - A Guest in the House (2023) (Students must obtain)
About the Instructor
Ayanni C. H. Cooper is a graduate of the English doctoral program at the University of Florida, where she specialized in comics and visual rhetoric. Her research interests include monster theory; gender & sexuality; science fiction & fantasy; multimodal texts, like podcasts; and erotica studies. She explored many of these themes in her dissertation project, “We Live in a Time of [Sexy] Monsters”: Exploring Erotic Monstrosity in Contemporary Visual Media. (To put it simply, she’s curious why so many folks are attracted to monsters. It’s a very important research question!) Ayanni also co-hosts the podcast Sex. Love. Literature., which takes a semi-scholarly look at why the “sex-stuff” in media matters. When not dissertating, she enjoys playing games with her family, finding new cartoons to watch/comics to read, and making friends with the neighborhood cats. You can find more information about Ayanni, including her publications, at ayanni.com.
Ayanni also co-hosts the podcast Sex. Love. Literature., which takes a semi-scholarly look at why the “sex-stuff” in media matters. When not dissertating, she enjoys playing Destiny with her family (#TitanMain), finding new cartoons to watch/comics to read, and making friends with the neighborhood cats. She lives with her husband Andrew and their chonky cats, Chloe and Grey Ghost, in San Antonio, TX.
