Sydney’s dissertation examines the diverse ways people, especially young women and girls, thought about and responded to constructs of love, domesticity, and gendered roles in postwar America. In doing so, it explores romance comic books published from 1947 to the mid-1970s. Uncovering the voices of rebellious young readers during a time of seeming conservative acendency, Sydney reexamines the conservative-liberal battleground of the long postwar period.
Sydney Heifler is a Ph.D. Candidate at The Ohio State University. She is a historian of Modern American history, specializing in pop culture, gender, sexuality, and race during the postwar period. Her research focuses on postwar romance comic books and the young women and girls who read them.
Sydney’s research has been supported by the Library of Congress through the Caroline and Erwin Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon’s Swann Foundation Fellowship. Her work has been published in PanelxPanel and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Her 2020 article, “Romance Comics, Dangerous Girls, and the Importance of Fathers,” (published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics in May 2020) won the Comics Studies Society 2021 Article Prize.
Prior to her time at The Ohio State University, Sydney received her AB in History from the University of California, Davis, and her MSt in Women’s Studies from The University of Oxford.
