Dr. Jack Zipes, photo supplied
World-renowned scholar of fairy-tale studies and children’s literature, Dr. Jack Zipes, will be presenting a lecture on Flying Fairy Tales: Reading Stories through Picture Postcards on Thursday, October 12, 2017 at 1:30 pm in Room 3M71, Manitoba Hall. This event is free and open to the public.
Tales of Wonder book cover
Zipes will be showing 50 images from his new book Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales Through Picture Postcards (University of Minnesota Press), a pictorial history of fairy-tale postcards from the late 1800s to the present. He looks at how key scenes of fairy tales have been rendered over time, suggesting a rethinking and reliving of the tales through the years, providing new perspectives on familiar stories.
Dr. Pauline Greenhill agrees with fellow fairy-tale expert Dr. Marina Warner when she says, “Jack Zipes is the most learned and indefatigable historian and polemicist of fairy tale as a cultural phenomenon, and he has always been alert to the technologies of the stories’ circulation.”
Zipes is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota with an academic career that spans more than 40 years and includes the publication of an astonishing over 70 books in English and German. His insight that folk- and fairy-tales must be read within their historical, economic, social, and cultural contexts deeply influenced the field of study of traditional texts directed to young people. Recently, Zipes gifted his unique and rich collection of 1,000 fairy-tale films to The University of Winnipeg library, the largest database of fairy tale films in the world. This peerless collection of resource material cements UWinnipeg as the place to go to conduct research in this area.
The University of Winnipeg will present Zipes with an Honorary Doctor of Laws at Autumn 2017 Convocation, on Friday, October 13, 2017.
This lecture is sponsored by the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Margaret Laurence Endowment.
