Name James Danky | Education Ripon College | |
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Books Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics Into Comix Similar People Wayne A Wiegand, Sanford Berman, Denis Kitchen | ||
A Conversation with James Danky
James Danky (born 1947) is an American historian, bibliographer, and culture critic. He is currently a faculty associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Danky is best known as an advocate for collecting alternative and small-press publications during his tenure at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
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Biography
Danky received an AB in history and philosophy from Ripon College (1970) and a MA in Library Science at the University of Wisconsin (1973). He served as the Newspapers and Periodicals Librarian for the Wisconsin Historical Society from 1976-2007. Danky is also a co-founder of the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America and served as its director from 1992-2006. Since 1999 he has taught for the School of Journalism with a focus on race and media. Danky continues to edit the series "Print Culture History in Modern America" for the University of Wisconsin Press.
Honors and awards
Danky is the recipient of the American Library Association’s Bowker/Ulrich’s Serials Librarianship award (1987) and the Isadore Gilbert Mudge-R.R. Bowker Award (2002). In 1991, Danky was a Fulbright Scholar at the British Library, where his research focused on the alternative press in Britain, especially Afro-British publications. In 1998 he returned to London to teach American History at University College. He was named a Media Hero at the Institute for Alternative Journalism (1991), was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society (1996), and was a fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African-American Research at Harvard from 1997-1998.
In 2007 friends and colleagues put on a two-day conference, "Alternative Print Culture: Social History and Libraries," the results of which were published in Library Trends, v.56, n.3; Winter, 2008. This conference celebrated Danky’s contributions and collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society.