Literature, and children’s literature specifically, helps instill value and humanity in times of crisis, as portrayed in Jude Idada’s Boom Boom. Both adults and children find it challenging to handle chronic diseases, such as sickle cell, HIV/AIDS, and viral hepatitis B. Focusing on one of these lethal diseases, sickle cell anemia, this study argues that, even with great innovations in medical science, society is the main killer and not the disease itself. Since disease forms ...

Historical Memory in Narrative is the third annual undergraduate research showcase sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group. It features multidisciplinary presentations of undergraduate research related to childhood, including senior honors thesis research in Comparative Literature by senior major Isabella Williams and research on Writing and Literature by Tia Trinh in the College of Creative Studies. The panel of presentations and subsequent discussion on the theme Historical Memory in Narrative ...

This talk explores how modern adaptations of Dante’s Divine Comedy for young readers reshape the poem’s theology of violence. In Inferno, punishment reflects divine justice and the consequences of disordered love; in contemporary picturebooks, illustrated editions, and comics, this moral framework is often softened, secularized, or inverted. Through examples from Italy, the United States, and Japan, the talk shows how artists translate Dante’s violence into abstraction, irony, or spectacle, transforming divine retribution into aesthetic or ...