The Second World War in the Contemporary Graphic Novel: A Conversation with Nora Krug

In the series Mediated Memories of Responsibility, part of the Cultural Memory Seminar curated by Guido Bartolini (UCC) and Joseph Ford (IMLR)

Speakers: Nora Krug in conversation with Claire Gorrara (Cardiff)
Chair: Guido Bartolini (UCC)

The IMLR is delighted to host award-winning author Nora Krug, a renowned artist whose visual work has engaged with the darkest pages of the 20th century history. Dialoguing with Professor Claire Gorrara, an expert of visual representations of war and conflict, Nora Krug will reflect on her award-winning graphic memoir Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home. The conversation will discuss Krug’s writing trajectory and her relationship to German history as an émigré author, as well as more general issues related to the cultural memory of World War II in contemporary society. Throughout, the conversation will consider how the form of the graphic novel can contribute to addressing the past in productive ways.

Nora Krug is a German-American author and illustrator and Associate Professor of Illustration at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. She is the author of Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (foreign edition title Heimat), a visual memoir that was chosen as a best book of the year by the New York Times, The Guardian, and the Boston Globe.  Krug was named Moira Gemmill Illustrator of the Year and 2019 Book Illustration Prize Winner by the Victoria and Albert Museum, and she is a recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Maurice Sendak Foundation, and others.

Claire Gorrara is Professor of French at Cardiff University where she is also Dean of Research and Innovation for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. She researches broadly in the area of visual cultures and has published work on popular culture and narratives of the Second World War in France, including recent work on photography, gender and the Liberation period. She is currently researching comic books and graphic novels that address the intergenerational transmission of European memories of the Holocaust.