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FCH 2009 Media Arts and Culture



These are big days for comics fans. WATCHMEN is coming out and Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men, the edited volume I am working on with William Svitavsky and Thomas Donaldson has reached a major milestone. This year's Florida Conference of Historian(FCH) meeting in Fort Myers, FL marks the contributor's first meeting. Some very smart people came from across the country and around the world to present their research at the FCH. This is not surprising because the FCH has been a welcoming forum for everyone interested in any area of historical inquiry for nearly 50 years. This year, the board voted to create Special Interest Sections (SIS) designed to attract scholars interested in specific subjects. One SIS of interest to me is Media Arts and Culture. This special section will be forum for everyone interested in comics, movies, television, film, and radio who might be interested in presenting research with a historical dimension. The creation of this SIS is linked to Professor Svitavsky and myself in a small way. Our success organizing a series of "Comics and Society" panels in 2007 allowed us to develop the book proposal for Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men. We were able to create three panel in 2007 and those panels served as the foundation for the Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men, a book that explores comics and comic book culture in the United States in the 20th century. This year's meeting marks the first time we actually got to see some of the contributors to the volume in the flesh. The panels we organized for this year's meeting gave us the opportunity to put faces to names and hear people present their research. The video above is actually from one of the two panels we organized for this year's FCH meeting related to the book. We needed to move some chairs around to see some of power-point presentation by some of the presenters.

"Nuff Said will be the place to read about this new book and get more information about the ideas these smart and engaging scholars are offering comics and comic culture in the United States.
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