US Studies Network Scholar Profile - Joe Sutliff Sanders

Bio: Joe is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education who specialises in children's media of the United States, including animation, comic books, picture books, games, and novels. Joe’s research tends to begin with questions about form and genre—How can a work of nonfiction signal a lack of authority? What does the shape of a picture book invite? How does the formula of best-selling novels about orphan girls shift over time?—and extend then to explorations of ideology. His approach to children’s literature is therefore primarily textual, historical, and theoretical. Over the course of his career, Joe has been awarded numerous fellowships from prestigious institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright Commission, and he has published eight books and dozens of journal articles spanning his areas of interest. Joe brings to the US Studies Network over ten years of teaching experience in literature departments at universities across the United States.

“From the beginning of my academic career, back as a university student, I was trying to figure out how to talk in high‑brow ways about things that were not high‑brow, and to produce readings that were not just indulgent, but were genuinely insightful and that helped us understand the things we love better. And I think that's still what I'm doing. I just kind of keep doing that over and over again.” 

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your academic background? Where are you from, and how did you become interested in your field?

Joe: I grew up in western North Carolina, just outside Asheville, which is the tourist town that everybody knows there. I have lived all over the US. I was actually born in California, then did two degrees in Arkansas, and then did my doctorate in Kentucky. I don't come from a background of obvious educational privilege. Western North Carolina is an economically depressed area… and I very much had to work my way up. There wasn't any Ivy League degree that introduced me to the right people or anything like that.

When I first went to university, I wanted to go into advertising, and the closest that the university had was journalism. So I won a scholarship to be a journalism major… But about two weeks in, I just hated everything. I was bored. I was doing well in the classes, but just could not care less. And I had these friends who were in this honors English class, and they would talk about what they were doing and that got me excited. So I begged and begged to be let in even though it was really late, and that meant that I had to do an overage. I was at 19 hours for that first semester, but I loved it, and that brought joy back into my life. I was able to do all the other classes with enthusiasm, because I knew I had this English class to go back to. 

And as I was just living life as an English major, I was also a lifelong comic book fan. In my last year at university, there was this special seminar you could apply to have a special topic seminar offered. So, a year ahead of time, I got a petition for a seminar on mythology, and this professor very kindly took out time to design a new class. As we were going through the class, talking about Jung or Joseph Campbell and all of the ideas about how mythology around the world fits together, I would say things like, “Oh, you know, it's so funny that that's a pattern in mythology, because there's a story of Batman where this happens.” And the first time, my teacher was like, “Oh, God, that is weird…thanks for sharing that.” And then the next time, he says, “Yeah…that's weird…” And then the third time he said, “Uh huh..” And then after a while, he started saying, “You cannot write your final paper in this class on Batman.” I remember him saying that to me, and me thinking, “Well, I wasn't going to, but now I kind of want to.” So, I went to his office maybe halfway through the term and said, “Listen, I can write a very good paper on whatever I need to write about, but if you let me write about Batman, I will write the best paper you've ever seen.” He very reluctantly agreed, and I wrote the best paper I'd ever written, and I loved the experience. And so it just sort of stuck with me that there was something to prove in writing about popular things from within a high-brow culture. So that's where it started. And then it just never went away. 

As a graduate student and then a career academic, I would do a normal professor's work of research on the stuff that I knew would be recognised, and then I would also write this other stuff that I also loved but that didn’t really fit into a conventional academic profile, and I kept track of it on my CV, but I didn't think that would be my career. And then as time went by, a couple things happened. 

One is that graphic novels weirdly started to become part of literary culture, and I had established that I could talk about it that way. So I got more calls. 

And another was that I had developed a career as a children's literature specialist, and although children's literature cultural gatekeepers, for a long time, had been the loudest opponents of comic books, they started to become very interested in these things called graphic novels, and they started to win awards, and nobody in the field knew how to talk about them. And I did know how to talk about them, just kind of through stubbornness. And that carried me for a long time. 

And then when I applied to the position at Cambridge, they knew they needed someone who could also talk about comic books, but nobody here had any capacity to learn, so I weirdly wound up with an advantage in applying for the job, because I kept writing about this thing that I cared about too much to stop, even when my professor told me not to.

What do you study, and how does your work relate to the United States?

Joe: I have three monographs. The most recent one is about a children's animated show called Batman: the Animated Series. This show came out in the 1990s, and I focused on the history of the show as well as some of the major concerns about American culture in the stories. For example, I looked at how the show explores to what extent wealth is a good thing in an American story. Also, there's this character, Harley Quinn, who was invented in this show, and she is this real contradiction. She's empowered, full of agency, strong, interesting, wonderful. She is also a survivor of domestic abuse, and she keeps putting herself back into the abusive relationship. That chapter is about the history of American feminism and how to understand Harley within that. 

My previous monograph was about children's nonfiction. The short version is that literary scholars didn’t know how to talk about children's nonfiction. Basically all they knew to say was, is it accurate? If it's accurate, it's good. Is it less than accurate? If so, it's bad. And I had a lot of trouble with that. First of all, it's an uninteresting conversation. And you know, in the humanities, if you're not making an interesting conversation, you're not doing your job. Another reason that I was disappointed in the existing approach is that there's actually only ever one answer, because as long as nonfiction is written by human beings, it will always have flaws, so by the existing standard, children’s nonfiction was always doomed to be disappointing. That’s a really uninteresting answer to an uninteresting question. I had this idea that maybe nonfiction could be read for where it invites critical engagement, where it opens up places that we can do thinking ourselves, where we can push back against received thought…that sort of thing. It’s about American children's nonfiction over about a 200 year period, saying, “Here are different ways to look not for where nonfiction is authoritative but for where it makes itself vulnerable and where it invites critical engagement.” 

And then my first monograph was about literary history. Literary history is a genre of literary criticism that says, “Here is how an idea or a genre changes over time.” In the middle of the 19th century, there was this very, very popular kind of novel, usually by and supposedly for women, called the sentimental novel. The first bestseller in world history was a sentimental novel in 1850, and our general understanding was that this sort of novel was a huge, popular fad for about 30 years, and then it just kind of went away. What my book demonstrates is that it didn't go away. What happened is that the genre moved from novels for women to novels for girls. And if we look over the next 50 years, we can see how these classic orphan girl novels like Pollyanna and The Secret Garden took the formula from that bestseller over time, slowly adapted it, and actually pushed back against some of the first-wave feminist original principles of the sentimental novel. They really rewrote ideas about feminine power, about how to deal with masculinity, individualism, privacy, and private ownership.

What are you currently working on that you’re most excited about?

Joe: Right now, I'm finishing a book that is about the history of comic books in US libraries. In the 1940s and 1950s, librarians in the US were mostly opposed to comic books. They saw comic books as the opposite of real reading. They saw them as not books, and they thought any time a child spent reading a comic book was time taken away from reading something that was good for them, something that counted as reading. But today, librarians love graphic novels. They're a major customer base for graphic novels. And how that happened - that change from the 1940s to 2005 - that's what the book is about. The book starts in 1970, when there were these tentative, quiet, nervous, anxious experiments with comic books in libraries, and they kept anticipating that there would be this huge uproar when people found out there were comics in the libraries based on what had happened 20 years earlier. Instead, they got no pushback at all. In fact, people seemed to be very happy with it. And so in the 70s and 80s, there were these experiments kind of proving the concept of comics in libraries. And then in the 80s, the experiments grew. But there was an increasing sense that comic books - these floppy magazine-style objects - just didn’t work in a library setting. Comic books are supposed to be ephemeral. They're supposed to fall apart. And that's not what you want out of a library object. Also, they don't have an ISBN. They weren't being reviewed in the journals that librarians cared about. They couldn't be reviewed in those journals because those journals took maybe three months of production time, and comic books come out monthly. So by the time a review of an issue came out, it would already be four months old and useless, and that comic would no longer be available. But in the 90s, we get graphic novels, these book-shaped comic books that have ISBNs and that are published once and stay the same in later editions. They could be reviewed, they could be cataloged, they could be put on a shelf. You could put a sticker out on the spine. And they look like books. So the book discusses the idea that librarians accepted comics when they convinced themselves that comics were books, were literary, and were feminist friendly, because librarianship in the US has been dominated by very smart women for a very long time. The name of the monograph is Making Comics Books.

There's another thing I'm working on that I am extremely excited about that is not purely US focused but is relevant to a US audience. Right now I have a collaborator who is a psychologist. She's a specialist in autism who has an interest in comics. I'm a specialist in comics who has an interest in autism, and we have been doing several different projects together. We won a grant through which we brought together different stakeholders in the comics ecosphere here in Britain. So these are people who run shops or festivals or museums or exhibits or libraries, and we brought together autistic advocates and autistic creators and fans, and we did this series of workshops and this huge survey that was massively successful, with over 600 respondents to it, which is just off the charts, right? The idea was saying, “How can we make comics spaces more inclusive for autistic people?” And the outcome of that is two things. One of them is a very conventional, academic thing. We have a list of best practices that comes from this participatory exchange that we've had over the last year. The other is very weird for an academic output - we made a comic book. We didn't do it ourselves, it’s professionally made, and it narrativises some of the key ideas of that list of best practices. The BBC did an article on the survey that we were running, and then about a month ago, it did a follow-up piece spotlighting the comic book and the best practices.

BBC Press and comic book links: 

So this is a big deal because although all of the work has been done in Britain, it's a big deal for the US Studies Network, because every library in the US, every Comics Festival, every convention, every place that brings together comics fans has a lot of autistic people there. These documents will help people make those spaces more inclusive for autistic people.

We've just finished that part. Now what we're going on with is to figure out: “What is it about comics that works for autistic people?” There will be psychological reasons, there will be therapeutic reasons, there will also be cultural reasons. For example, some of the autistic people we've spoken with have said something that never dawned on me, which is that comic books are delivered to a comic shop on the same day of the week. So in the US, it's Wednesday late afternoon or evening. That's when the new comics come in and the shop opens all the stock up, puts it in the little reserve boxes, puts stuff out on the shelves. You come in Thursday, and the new comics are there. And these fans said, “I really struggle with things when they aren't scheduled, and the fact that comics have this schedule, and that I know the next issue of this thing I'm interested in will be out one month from this Wednesday… it's comforting and it's enjoyable, and it reduces the stress that I have about other things.” So my point is that there are going to be some surprising things about comics that have to do with the format, but also have to do with the way they're consumed that I'm very excited about. 

Can you say a bit about how your work tells us something about the US in particular? 

Joe: One of the things my work often uncovers is all of these paradoxes in what it means to be American. To go back to nonfiction - we have this thriving children's nonfiction industry, and it wants to share information with children, but it often wants to do so in a way that prevents them from asking too many questions. So there's this kind of tension built into children's nonfiction of “We will tell you things, but don't look under the hood. Just learn the information.” That said, there's also an awful lot of children's nonfiction in the US over 200 years now or longer, that actually does say, “Constantly ask questions about this. Don't believe everything you read. Here's something I'm telling you. I want you to process it, and later on, I'll tell you what I think about it.” So there's this paradox built into it. 

One of the great paradoxes of comics and libraries is that US librarians, I think more than librarians in any other country, have pinned their professional identity to anti-censorship, that librarians are against censorship. That wasn't always true in the early history. In fact, the opposite was true, but for at least the last 100, maybe 150 years, US librarians have said repeatedly, “we are against censorship.” At the same time, they were also saying, “We don't want any comic books. We're not going to censor anything, as long as it's something we're okay with not censoring.” So there's this paradox built into American librarianship, one that I'm not the first person to point out, but I've documented how librarians talked themselves around to being able to accept this thing that they used to forbid. And there are a lot of lessons in there about how we can say we occupy this position, politically, ideologically, philosophically, but we behave exactly contrary to it. And that's something that happens all the time in American culture and politics, philosophy, religion, all the way around. 

What has it been like to study the United States at Cambridge? And do you think there's anything particularly fruitful about studying the US from this side?

Joe: I'm glad you phrased it that way, because the easy thing to do is to talk about the difficulties. I mean, I don't have to tell you that materials are hard to access. However, there are good things about studying the US from Cambridge, too. One is that you find yourself having to explain things that you and an American audience would take for granted, and in having to explain those things, you re-examine the assumptions that you've made. So that I would say is probably one of the best things for a rigorous scholarly approach - that I can't skip over anything. I have to start all the way at the beginning. When I say a library, [I have to say] this is what a public library is, as opposed to a school library, as opposed to a university library, as opposed to, etc. I'd say probably that's the best thing, that it weirdly puts me in a position where I'm not only more careful in my analysis, but I also go to the foundation because I have to, and by re-examining that foundation, I examine the whole thing more rigorously.

What is special or particularly fruitful about having a Cambridge USA Network and Centre? 

Joe: Yeah - I am really excited about this. I mean, everybody's going to be using the word synergy. I'm excited about the synergy between the different groups, between the different disciplines. When we had one of our early meetings and we talked briefly about what we did, I realised that I could have saved a lot of time at earlier stages of my project if I'd known that so-and-so was in the same city, you know, and that I could have bounced ideas off of them. It's also really special to have a place like this in Cambridge, as opposed to in the US, because…when you're in America, working on America, and everyone around you is American, you're like, “Yeah, I could talk to people. I could try to develop this idea, but there's plenty of time to do it later.” At Cambridge, there are rare moments you have with somebody to whom you don't have to explain all the backstory, to whom you don't have to explain all of the assumptions. So you are really desperate for those conversations, and they're really valuable to you, and they become the kind of thing that you set aside time for, and you recognize them for how rare and valuable they are. Most of us [US scholars] don't see each other, and it's only when we're at high table and we can hear someone talking funny, you know, using the word “pants” wrong, that you go, “Wait a minute.” So, the Network will  actually make us come together because it's cross-disciplinary. 

[Interviewer interjection] I recently presented at the School of Architecture, got invited to this thing completely randomly. And I was like, Why do architects care about what I'm doing? And during all the other presentations, I was like, “Oh my God, had I known these people existed, like, four years ago or even a year ago, my research would have been radically improved,” and I would never have thought to go to the architecture school for what I was doing. So I can imagine it's quite exciting. 

Joe: That's right, even just in our brief conversation so far, we're discovering all sorts of points of conversions. And those points always existed, but it took the development of the Network to help us see them.