Girls, Zines, and Their Travels: Imagining Lives, Crafting Archives for a New Century — 36th Annual Bishop Lecture

Professor Janice Radway will deliver the 36th annual Louis Faugères Bishop Lecture online on March 10, 2022, at 6:00 p.m. Her topic is "Girls, Zines, and Their Travels: Imagining Lives, Crafting Archives for a New Century."

Janice Radway is the Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies and a professor of American studies and gender studies within the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. Radway is widely known for her scholarship on readers, reading, books, and the history of middlebrow culture. She has served as the editor of American Quarterly, the official journal of the American Studies Association. Her book, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, recently won the Fellows Book Award as a “classic” in the field from the International Communication Association. She is also the author of A Feeling for Books: The Book- of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire, and co-editor of  American Studies: An Anthology and Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1945, which is Volume IV of A History of the Book in America.

Currently, Radway is working on an oral history of girls, their underground publishing efforts during the 1990s, and their subsequent lives. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and has lectured widely throughout the U.S. and internationally. She is a past president of the American Studies Association and professor emerita at Duke University, where she taught for twenty years and served as chair of the literature program. She received a BA from Michigan State University, an MA from State University of New York at Stony Brook, and a PhD in American Studies from Michigan State.

A zine, short for magazine or “fanzine,” is a non-commercial, handmade, self-published resource often devoted to unique or specialized subject matter. Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives collects New Jersey and regional zines, many of which were done by women and girls. The finding aid for the Rutgers New Jersey Regional Zine Collection is available online. For more information on zines and to view some examples from the Rutgers collection, visit the CREATE Research Guide.

To attend the Bishop Lecture, please register online.

If you have questions about this lecture, please contact Fernanda Perrone, Archivist & Head of the Exhibitions Program.