The February 19, 2013 issue of The New York Times included an article highlighting Carol Tilley’s recent research on Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist whose 1954 book The Seduction of the Innocent claimed that comic books corrupting the minds of young readers. Dr. Tilley is a SLIS alumna (Ph.D.’07).
Dave Itzkoff’s article, “Scholar Finds Flaws in Work by Archenemy of Comics” noted:
• Carol L. Tilley, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, reviewed Wertham’s papers, housed in the Library of Congress, starting at the end of 2010, shortly after they were made available to the public.
In a new article in Information & Culture: A Journal of History, Dr. Tilley offers numerous examples in which she says Wertham “manipulated, overstated, compromised and fabricated evidence,” particularly in the interviews he conducted with his young subjects.
• Dr. Tilley said she planned to continue to look at Wertham’s papers for a larger project she is writing on the history of comic-book readers. She said there were broader lessons to be learned from Wertham’s case and the ways cultural panics recur.
“We need to be reasonable and realize that it could be that some of the research is flawed,” she said. “It could be that some people are choosing to preference their own personal beliefs or their own agenda above doing good research. I think this can be a cautionary reminder.”
Posted March 21, 2013