Alumni Reading Groups

Having trouble reaching a reading group? Email us at and we will assist.

• Chicago – Loop (virtual)
  
• Chicago – North
  
• Denver, Colorado
  
• Europe (virtual)
  
• Fort Wayne, Indiana
  
• Indianapolis, Indiana
  
• Minneapolis, Minnesota
  
• Washington, D.C. 
  

The following areas have recently active groups in need of a volunteer coordinator. Please email christ.college@valpo.edu if interested!

• Austin, Texas
• Detroit, Michigan
• Lincoln, Nebraska
• Los Angeles, California
• Phoenix, Arizona
• Rockford, Illinois
• Silicon Valley, California
• Sioux Falls, South Dakota
• Valparaiso, Indiana

There are also alumni who are interested in meeting in the following areas:

• Shreveport, Lousiana
• Charlotte, North Carolina
• Hardy, Virginia
• Deep Water Bay, Hong Kong

If you live near one of these cities, please let us know and we’ll get you connected!

These groups give alumni a cherished opportunity to continue these life-changing conversations and participate in the life of the College. Each year, Christ College provides the groups with a syllabus, including a reading list and suggested discussion questions, that touches on themes and texts that are discussed in a Christ College seminar that year.

Associate Dean Zachary King ’10, Ph.D.

In the first chapter of an Oxford Handbook (2020) on the subject, Benjamin Woo asks the question, “What kind of studies is comics studies?” As a field of inquiry, comic books are sometimes regarded as a relatively recent addition to the academy; however, educators as early as the 1940s and 1950s spilled some ink over whether comics were an effective introduction to reading or whether they might actually be the leading cause of juvenile delinquency. (Depending on who you ask, the jury may still be out on both questions.)
Most agree, though, that 1986 represents a watershed year in comics. Three things happened in 1986: first, Frank Miller wrote and drew The Dark Knight Returns, which reimagines Batman as an aging Clint Eastwood type, lured out of retirement by urban decay and his own addiction to crimefighting. That same year, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons gave us Watchmen, a text which scrutinizes the genre conventions of the superhero narrative more broadly (and which you’ll read this year). Finally, Art Spiegelman published a collected edition of Maus, bringing his father’s experience of the Holocaust to a readership that embraced it as, finally, the one comic that allowed us to take comics seriously. (Sarcasm intended.)
Since 1986, Maus remains one of the most-studied comic books, but it opened the floodgates for academics and casual readers alike to see what other stories were being told using both words and pictures. Superhero stories tend to dominate popular perception of comics, but as a medium and a language, comics can tell stories in every fictional genre – and in the case of Maus and some of the texts you’ll read this year, nonfiction, as well. We’ll begin with formal analysis, considering the possibilities of the medium through two seminal texts – Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993) and Watchmen (1986), from Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons. We’ll undertake a case study on Jack Kirby, who has been described as “one of the chief architects of the contemporary American imagination,” with particular attention to his Fantastic Four (1961- 1966). Next up, we’ll enter the world of memoir/autobiographical comics with Zoe Thorogood’s It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth (2022) before ultimately concluding with Emil Ferris’s
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017). A few bonus exercises are included throughout this syllabus, in case you want to expand or diversify this year’s foray into comics.
This course was designed to introduce undergraduate students to the wonderful world of comics, and to the reading protocols that distinguish comics from film, from prose, and from poetry. Whether you have been collecting comics your whole life, or whether you have never read a graphic novel, this syllabus provides a foot in the door for at least something new in your literary diet.

Historical Crime in American Film – Prof. Samuel Graber
What We Talk about When We Talk about Crime
Movies have always been a great excuse to have a good conversation. That’s perhaps especially true of crime movies, despite their typically dark and troubling content, because stories that feature crimes almost inevitably push us to consider larger moral questions and timeless tensions. Crime stories can help us think and talk about God and humanity, morality and law, individual freedom and social constraints, intellect and passion, virtue and vice, values and the good life, idealism and practicality, equality and inequality, and (perhaps especially) the legitimate and illegitimate use of power.

Read and download the syllabus