The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum (BICLM) is pleased to announce the winners of the annual Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award for 2026. 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 2026 are Dr. Standford Carpenter and Sebastian Martinez.
Dr. Stanford Carpenter
Dr. Stanford W. Carpenter is a cultural anthropologist, comic creator, and former archaeologist. Whether it’s through the lens of Ancient Worlds, Afrofuturism, or the EthnoGothic, he conducts archival and ethnographic research among comic creators with an archeological sensibility that teases out the relationships between people, places, time, and things. He is the academic liaison for Comicpalooza and founder of Comicpalooza University (CPU); sits on the advisory board of Abrams ComicArts Megascope imprint; and is a co-founder and former chairman of the Black & Brown Comix Arts Festival (BCAF). Dr. Carpenter will use the Lucy Shelton Caswell Research award to research contemporary notions of afrofuturism, the ethnogothic/conjure culture, colonial counter narratives, and heroism as they relate to Black Press comic strips; Black comic creators; and Black creative communities from the Civil Rights and Pre Civil Rights Eras. This project builds on a forthcoming book on Black comics, creators, and characters for Fantagraphics as well as a podcast, created with the support of the Houston Museum of African American Culture, exploring the life and work of Ezra Clyde Jackson, a Black cartoonist who inspired his daughter Texas congresswoman Shiela Jackson Lee’s efforts to gain reparations.
Sebastian Martinez
Sebastian Martinez is from El Paso, Texas and is currently working on obtaining a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from The University of Texas at El Paso. He received an M.A. in Rhetoric and Writing Studies from UTEP in 2022. Sebastian began teaching in 2021 and currently works as an assistant instructor of First-Year Composition at UTEP. Sebastian’s current areas of research interest include comics studies, visual rhetoric, writing pedagogy, and digital rhetoric. Martinez will use the Lucy Shelton Caswell Research award to analyze novelty product advertisements in 1960’s and 70’s comic books from a sociological and visual rhetorical perspective, interpreting what these advertisements reveal about the sociocultural climate at the time of their circulation. Martinez intends to examine how these product advertisements helped construct Cold War ideologies, gender norms, and popular conceptions about childhood through the visual medium of comics.
Congratulations Stanford and Sebastian!
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