The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum (BICLM) is pleased to announce the winners of the annual Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award for 2022. As a result of postponing the 2021 award due to COVID, we were able to provide two awards for 2022. The award is named for Professor Emerita Lucy Shelton Caswell, the founding curator of BICLM, and provides $2500 to support researchers who need to travel to Columbus, Ohio to use the BICLM collections materials on site.

We were delighted to receive a robust and diverse range of proposals from both national and international scholars and artists. A panel of reviewers from a variety of disciplines at Ohio State was appointed to assess the proposals.

The recipients for 2022 are Adrienne Resha and Eike Exner. 

2022 Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award winner Adrienne Resha

Adrienne Resha is a Ph.D. student at the College of William and Mary. She will be researching race, color and printing technology, combining “color theory and critical race theory to articulate a critical color theory in original comic books” for her dissertation, From Superman to Sana Amanat: Alienation, Assimilation, and American Superhero Comics, 1938 to Present. Her time at BICLM will be used to closely study original printings of Silver, Bronze and modern age comics – with a special focus on Green Lantern comics and the character John Stewart, to “observe how race was produced in mainstream comics before digital coloring became the industry norm in the 1980s.”

2022 Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award winner Eike Exner

2022 Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award winner Eike Exner

Eike Exner received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and is now an independent scholar. His revised dissertation, Comics and the Origins of Manga, was recently published by Rutgers University Press. He will be researching representations of women in pre-war manga for a book chapter in an anthology on women and manga and for a book-length history of modern manga. Exner wrote, “Though the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum also holds an impressive collection of post-war manga, its pre-war manga collection is unparalleled in the United States (perhaps even outside of Japan generally) and the pre-war publications are significantly more difficult to find and access.”

Congratulations Adrienne and Eike!

The application process for the 2023 award will take place in Fall 2022.

Ongoing support of this award was made possible by a generous gift from the Will and Ann Eisner Family Foundation, which was matched by many additional donors to create an endowment. The endowment provides funding for one award to be given each year. Past awardees include Kevin Cooley, Dr. Susan Kirtley, Dr. Daniel Worden, Xavier Dapena and Frank Santoro.