Reading pictures and teaching history: A conversation with D. B. Dowd

Illustration is rapidly shifting. Where once illustration was seen as solely a service industry, it now offers opportunities for students, historians and visual culture scholars to engage in scholarship about the cultural work that illustration performs. The Illustration and Visual Culture MFA Program at WashU provides such opportunities for students to engage not only with studio work, but archival research, scholarship and history. In this interview, professor of design and American culture studies at WashU, D.B. Dowd, shares his perspectives on the importance of anchoring illustration in history for his students and provides insights from his new book, Reading Pictures: A History of Illustration. Illustration, Dowd asserts, is contingent upon such historical factors as the development of mass printing technologies, the rise of mass literacy and the intricacies of the publishing industry. This interview offers pedagogical guidance for instructors of illustration history and novel frameworks for visual culture scholars.