Course ProgramCourse Participants and Fees The Summer School is open to all Master’s and PhD students, postdocs, and faculty members in Europe or abroad (retired, part- or full-time) in the fields of Journalism, Media and Communications, History and Languages, as well as professional journalists from Nancy/Metz, France in general and abroad.
Registration fees: 0 € for students (Master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral) 0 € for unemployed or retired faculty 50 € for part-time faculty or professional 100 € for full-time faculty or professional
Course Requirements Full attendance is mandatory (morning and afternoon, Monday through Friday). Working alone or in groups of two or three (depending on course enrollment), students must deliver a twenty-minute oral presentation in one of the program’s four languages (English, Spanish, Polish or French) during the final afternoon of the course. Topics will be selected at the end of the second day.
Course Credit For PhD students, 5 crédits toward the Formations disciplinaires, Formations transverses or Langues: Anglais-FLE requirements of their École Doctorale. For Master’s students, no ECTS credits can be awarded toward the completion of their degree, but the hours could be applied to the completion of a stage or any similar pedagogical requirement. All enrolled participants will receive at the end of the Summer School an attestation of their active participation (certificat de reconnaissance de formation, certificado de asistencia, certyfikat udziału w konferencji).
Course Prerequisites As English will be the Summer School’s lingua franca, a minimum B2 level is desired. However, Polish, German, Japanese, Spanish and French will also be used throughout the week-long school, should participants require additional language instruction.
Course Program
Instructors: John S. Bak, Université de Lorraine (France) Catalina Uribe Rincon, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia) Alexandra Wiktorowska, Uniwersytet WSB Merito w Poznaniu (Poland) John Hartsock, SUNY Cortland (United States) Soenke Zehle, Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar (Germany) Christopher Craig, 東北大学 (Tohoku University, Japan) Julie Wheelwright, Birkbeck College, University of London (England) Isis Menteth, British Academy, London (England) Jan Miklas-Frankowski, Uniwersytet Gdański (Poland)
Professional Guest Speaker: Yan Lindingre, “Cartoon for Peace” (BD artist and scenarist)
Course Content Modules: Individual modules are intended to teach students via lectures and workshops, with specific reading assignments of the history and the function of comics journalism, BD reportage and documentary manga per the eight different themes. A group project is required by the end of the week-long course.
Course Themes: Module 1: “Drawing Memory: Comics as Civic Storytelling. The Work of Spanish Artist Paco Roca” Director: Aleksandra Wiktorowska This module invites participants to explore the potential of comics as a form of civic storytelling, with a particular focus on the work of Spanish artist Paco Roca. Though not a journalist in the conventional sense, Roca’s graphic narratives – such as Los surcos del azar and El abismo del olvido – engage deeply with questions of history, memory, personal testimony, and collective trauma. His work offers a compelling example of how comics can document real experiences and give voice to stories often left out of official histories. Through a combination of visual analysis, group discussion, and a guided creative exercise, participants will reflect on how memory and narrative can intersect on the comics page. The session will culminate in the creation of a short comic, drawing on a personal or family memory that connects to a wider social or historical issue. No prior drawing skills are required – only an interest in storytelling and a willingness to experiment. This is a space for thinking about comics not only as art or entertainment, but as a powerful medium for witnessing, documenting, and imagining justice.
Module 2: “Making It Real: Using Zines to Explore Difficult Subjects” Nonfiction writers can use graphics to explore emotionally challenging personal and political subjects. Whether it’s Joe Sacco’s “comic journalism” on the Bosnian War, or Marjane Satrapi’s memoir Persepolis, these writers create powerful narratives that engage readers through the techniques often associated with literary journalism: scene setting, granular detail, dialogue, character development, dramatic tension and structures. But they provide the added dimension of visual illustrations to take readers further into their world, visualize its characters and experience the often complex emotions with the events they depict. In this Zine-production workshop, run over two days, we will ask students to come up with their own ideas for tackling a “difficult subject” of their choosing – working in small groups – to develop a story outline. After a brief introduction to literary journalism, documentary nonfiction and a brief history of Zines, we will provide students with the tools to create their projects during the workshop.
Module 3: “Japanese Atomic Manga and Graphic” This module will study Keiji Nakazawa’s atomic manga おれは見た(Ore wa mita, 1972) as graphic literary journalism. One of the first manga to be translated into English as I Saw It, it recounts the bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. A little over two decades later, he would recount his experiences, and confront his trauma, with the documentary manga I Saw It. Here, the emotional weight of the illustrations visualising his trauma tips the scale in terms of generating reader empathy. A few years later, when he expands this manga into the ten books that would comprise the world-famous series Barefoot Gen, the textual trauma he describes carries more levity and achieves a certain balance with the visual representation of suffering, his own as well as that of the Japanese people of Hiroshima. By the time he delivers his Autobiography a decade later, Nakazawa had said all he needed to say visually, and the book’s lengthy textual trauma is splayed out in minute detail, with only a few new illustrations now lending support. When studied diachronically, these three works reveal how Nakazawa’s healing process passed from predominantly image/(text) to text-image to finally text/(image), with the parentheses signifying that word’s recessed presence in the manga’s traditional text-image matrix.
Module 4: “Joe Sacco: The Emergence of a Comics Literary Journalist” We know Joe Sacco, graphic novelist and creator of Palestine, Safe Area Goražde and other works,set out to be a comics journalist. But he is also very much a literary journalist. Similar to literary journalism, he engages in a “narra-descriptive journalism” except the descriptive modality is reflected in the deceptively simple line drawing. But beyond that, we can detect at work in his graphic novels strategies many literary journalists embrace. Among them: He makes the familiar unfamiliar in the attempt to estrange us from our conventional ways of seeing the world. He foregrounds his subjectivity to play the “holy fool” in the attempt to disarm his readers. He leaves us suspended intentionally in the disorientation that comes of the “inconclusive present” resulting in a lack of closure. His satire of caricature not only reminds us of just how fragile all mimesis is, but also provides him the basis for a different mimetic freedom. On top of these, and especially relevant to the graphic novel, he leaves us voiceless in panels without text. Ultimately, he insists, literally, on the satiric “comic” image as fundamentally tragic to disrupt our social and cultural assumptions.
Module 5: “Documenting Trauma” This module offers an introduction to documentary comics and graphic novels, exploring how visual narratives uniquely engage with historical events and processes and, in so doing, continue to make unique contributions to the cultural techniques of an increasingly data-driven investigative aesthetics. Building on the growing interest in questions of authenticity and trustworthiness these works address, the module therefore also takes into account how this engagement is being reframed by generative technologies capable of creating vast amounts of synthetic representations that challenge and compete with existing forms of “engaged” media such as the documentary comic. Participants will examine the intersection of history, memory, and graphic form, gaining insight into how documentary comics expand traditional historical discourse by making it visually accessible and emotionally resonant. Combining historical examples with contemporary works of reportage, the session highlights the medium’s ability to convey complex socio-political realities through compelling storytelling and imagery. To contextualize the uniqueness of the comic as a distinct aesthetic practice, the workshop will include a brief foray into generative intelligence platforms used in investigative analysis and documentary storytelling.
Module 6: “Ink, Blood, and Truth: Drawing Colombia’s Memory through Narconarratives” This module will explore how recent Colombian graphic nonfiction reimagines the intertwined histories of narcotrafficking and journalism. It focuses on two works: Escobar. Una educación criminal (2025), by Juan Pablo Escobar, Pablo Martín Farina, and Alberto Madrigal; and Don Guillermo: una biografía ilustrada (2025), by Pablo Guerra and a collective of Colombian illustrators. Escobar revisits the violence of the 1980s through the eyes of the drug lord’s son. Spanish artist Alberto Madrigal’s soft watercolors and manga-inspired perspectives create an uneasy intimacy that blurs tenderness and brutality, exposing how aesthetic beauty can coexist with moral distortion. Don Guillermo, by contrast, reconstructs the life of journalist Guillermo Cano Isaza, editor of El Espectador, who was murdered by Pablo Escobar in 1986 for exposing the cartels and defending press freedom. By placing these two narratives in tension, the self-mythologizing story born of criminal legacy and the testimonial biography of a journalist who confronted it, this talk examines how Colombian comics transform violence into visual testimony and reclaim journalism as an act of moral and civic resistance.
Module 7: “Transgenerational Trauma: Encoding War Experience in American Comic Books” This module will guide students in exploring the ways that lived experiences, history, and trauma can be encoded in nonfictional, fictional and fictionalized American war comics over generations of production. Following an introduction to American war comics and an outline of their history and production, students will be given sample issues of war comics to study in order to identify and analyze images, descriptions, and other elements informed by lived or transmitted experiences. The first session will focus on stories published in the first half decade of American war comics, 1949-1952, when comics artists and writers often had direct and recent experience with combat. The second session will move to works published in the 1970s and 1980s, by which time the previous depictions of trauma and other experiences had been encoded into the genre and were interacting with contemporary experiences and consciousness of the Vietnam War and other conflicts.
Module 8: “Holocaust Representation in Non-Fiction Comics” The aim of this module is to analyze three distinct examples of Holocaust representation in non-fiction comics – Maus by Art Spiegelman, The Last Outrage: The Dina Babbitt Story by Raphael Medoff, Neal Adams, Joe Kubert, and Stan Lee, and Achtung Zelig! by Krzysztof Gawronkiewicz and Krystian Rosenberg – and to explore the relationship between nonfiction storytelling and traumatic memory. We will seek to demonstrate that nonfiction narratives function as socially significant tools for affective storytelling – for recovering suppressed histories and working through historical trauma (Wawrzyniak 2015; Bilewicz 2024). Since unprocessed trauma can lead to social polarization, it must be addressed through post-traumatic growth – by moving beyond intergenerational trauma via dialogue, empathy, and the transformation of memory. |
