March 19, 2025
Time:
3:45 pm
VC Faculty Lounge, Academic Block, LUMS
Abstract:
From the brightly-coloured moral certainties of the 1940s to the fraught and trammelled, ethically ambiguous figures of millennial comics, the figure of the superhero has often been used as a weathervane to understand contemporary tensions and anxieties. Dr. Tom Sewel's research argues that this apparent flexibility is misleading, and that the figure of the superhero is always already an avatar of fascist politics that conditions the reader to desire "the blandishments of strong men who will solve all their social problems for them by force" (Fredric Wertham). Even where the figure of the superhero is deployed as satire, it cannot avoid running foul of the tendency to idealise, idolise, and ideologise.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Tom Sewel has a first-class MA in English Literature and Arts & Media Informatics from the University of Glasgow and was awarded a PhD in English from the University of Calgary in 2023 for his dissertation, "Spirits in the Gutter: The British Invasion and the Haunting of the Twentieth Century". He is the secretary of the International Comparative Literature Association's standing research committee on Comics Studies and Graphic Narrative. He is the PI and director of the FIF-funded South Asian Speculative Fiction database (SASFdb) project and has been an Assistant Professor of English at LUMS since January 2024.
