“She’s a kind of genius.” That’s what English professor and former UVM president Daniel Mark Fogel has said about Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist and graphic memoirist he nominated to become a James Marsh Professor-at-Large in 2012. That sentiment was validated in a big way Sept. 17, when Bechdel was announced as a winner of a 2014 MacArthur Foundation grant, commonly called the “genius” award.

The prestigious honor recognizes “exceptional creativity,” the MacArthur Foundation website says, “promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.” It comes with a stipend of $625,000 for the recipient, paid out over five years.

It’s not the first time the Vermont cartoonist has been nationally recognized. She was winner of a 2012 Guggenheim fellowship, and her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was named Best Book of 2006 by Time magazine. Time also named her second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama, one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2012. For 25 years, Bechdel wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a generational chronicle called “one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.” (Ms. magazine.)
 
The goal of UVM’s James Marsh Professor-at-Large program is to invigorate the academic and cultural life of the university. It accomplishes this by appointing individuals of international distinction, like Bechdel, to honorary faculty positions, bringing them periodically to campus for lectures, classroom visits, conferences and collaboration — with faculty and with students.

Bechdel’s next visit to campus will happen the week of Nov. 10. On Nov. 13, she’ll give an Honors College plenary lecture in Ira Allen Chapel, free and open to the public, at 5:30 p.m.

PUBLISHED

09-17-2014
Amanda Kenyon Waite
Hear Bechdel talk about her work and her award.