FLB home News resources for undergraduates graduates faculty staff graduate assistants flb business office flb graduate student services   staff directory FLB directories UIUC home old browsers 2004-2005/032 March 31, 2005 19th-Century Pedagogy and Sequential Art Philippe Willems of the department of French and Italian at Northern Illinois University will give a lecture titled, “19th-Century Pedagogy and Sequential Art,” in Room 1022 in the Foreign Languages Building at UIUC, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana, on Thursday, April 7, at 4 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public. In his talk Willems will discuss the seminal illustrated stories of educators Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846) and Georges Colomb (1856-1945), professors at the Academy of Geneva and at the Sorbonne respectively. In these stories, the underlying theories of narration developed by their authors stand at the crossroad of teaching and linguistics. They prefigure such later concepts as narratology, communication theory, and the language of the cinema. A native of Paris, France, Willems received a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His current research explores 19th-century narrative strategies of word/image interplay in fiction. He recently published the first critical edition and English translation of Robida's illustrated science-fiction novel “The Twentieth Century” [Le Vingtième Siècle, 1882] with Wesleyan University Press. Willems’ lecture is sponsored by the UIUC Department of French.