Come visit the Stark County Main Library for an Ohio Humanities Speakers Bureau event with Linda Mizejewski about women detectives!

Generations of readers have enjoyed Nancy Drew, Miss Marple, and legions of spunky amateur female sleuths who picked up a flashlight to creep through the attic. But the 1980s brought a new heroine to the best seller list: the professional woman detective who gets her man with an arrest warrant or a bullet to the heart.  This talk explores this new woman detective character and her bumpy transition to the box office and network television, where grit has often been traded for glamour.  Topics include best selling writers Sue Grafton and Patricia Cornwell, television series from Charlie’s Angels to Cold Case, and films such as The Silence of the Lambs.

Linda Mizejewski is a Distinguished Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University. She has published six books on women in popular culture, including a book about the romantic comedy It Happened One Night. In her 2002 book Hardboiled and High Heeled: the Woman Detective in Popular Culture,she analyzes the female investigator character in cinema, television, and best-selling novels.  Her most recent two books are Hysterical! Women in American Comedy (2017) and Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics (2014).  Linda has been a Fulbright Lecturer in Slovakia and Romania, and her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2004 she was a winner of Ohio State University’s Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award.

Registration is required. Please check Stark County Library’s event page for more information!

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