Alison Bechdel

 Alison Bechdel joins the FAS as Professor in the Practice in English and Film & Media Studies. Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For became a countercultural institution among lesbians and discerning non-lesbians all over the planet.

 Bechdel self-syndicated Dykes to Watch Out For for twenty-five years, from 1983 to 2008. The award-winning generational chronicle has been called “one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period” by Ms. magazine. 

In 2006 she published Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Time magazine named it the Best Book of 2006. It was adapted into a musical by playwright Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori. It opened on Broadway on April 19, 2015, and won five Tony Awards, including “Best Musical.” 

Bechdel’s work is preoccupied with the overlap of the political and personal spheres, the relationship of the self to the world outside. Her 2012 memoir Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama delved into not just her relationship with her own mother, but the theories of the 20th-century British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Her most recent book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength (May 2021), continues her investigation of the relationship between inside and outside, in this case the outside where she skis, bikes, hikes, and wanders in pursuit of fitness and, incidentally, self-transcendence. 

Before arriving at Yale, Bechdel obtained her BA at Oberlin College. Her comics have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta. She has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships.