The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum (BICLM) is pleased to announce the winners of the annual Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award for 2025. 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 2025 are Dr. Brianna Anderson and Dr. Itzayana Gutiérrez Arillo.

Dr. Brianna Anderson

Brianna Anderson received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida and is now an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso. She will be researching representations of activism and youth agency in twentieth-century comics for a monograph on environmental comics. She’ll use her time at the BICLM to study comic strips in the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, as well as fan correspondence that young readers have sent to cartoonists like Bill Watterson and Brad Anderson.

Dr. Itzayana Gutiérrez Arillo

Itzayana Gutiérrez Arillo is a historian, curator and postdoctoral fellow in Communications and Media Studies at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. Gutiérrez’ research focuses on the study of racial discourses and the mobility of images as circulated by periodicals. For their digital archive project “Yellow Trouble: Anti-Asian Forms and the Pan American Comic Magazine, 1935-1950”, Gutiérrez will work at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum with the comic series Terry and the Pirates by the U.S. cartoonist Milton Caniff, his scrapbooks, tear sheets, and correspondence. Gutiérrez holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University, and a Master’s and Bachelor’s in History from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, respectively.

Congratulations Brianna and Itzayana!