On September 18/19, 2023, the conference “Comics, the Children and Childishness”, will take place in presence at KASK. It is one of the culminating outputs of the ERC project “Children in Comics: An Intercultural History (1865-)”, led by Prof. Maaheen Ahmed at Ghent University. The project aims to reconstruct a cultural history of European comics, particularly focusing on comics from Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Italy.

The conference is organized by Maaheen Ahmed und ComFor-member Giorgio Busi Rizzi (Ghent University). It aims to further deepen the interests and achievements of the ERC project, with the goal of opening a crucial forum for dialogue between European and international researchers, focusing on a distinctly international corpus, covering comics not only from the dominant areas of Western Europe and North America, but also from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Asia and Latin America. In this way, the conference aims to inspire further research in this neglected but crucial aspect of comics studies.

The complete program can be found here. Among the contributors are also other ComFor members besides Rizzi (Benoît Crucifix, Jaqueline Berndt, Eva Van der Wiele). Those interested in attending the conference can register here. Please address any questions to comics@ugent.be.