Illustration by Gil Medina (B.F.A. ’08), a winner of the annual Paula Pfeffer and Cheryl Johnson-Odim Political Cartoon Contest, which Teresa Prados-Torreira organizes.

Cartoons are no joke for Teresa Prados-Torreira. The Spanish-born scholar analyzes political cartoons as barometers of their eras, digging for telling historical details like a paleontologist sifting through bones. “Cartoons are not only beautiful and interesting, but they have a lot of information about the time they were produced and the audience that looked at them,” says Prados-Torreira, 53, a full-time history professor at Columbia since 1994 and a 2008 fellow at Columbia’s Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media.

Prados-Torreira is using her fellowship to continue her research of American women in cartoons from the colonial period through 9/11 in preparation for a book on the topic. Early on, female figures in cartoons were allegorical, she says, used to represent the colonies or virtues or other abstract ideas. As women became more political, they began appearing in cartoons in a more concrete way—but not in a favorable light. “With the rise of the suffrage movement, there are lots of cartoons poking fun at women,” she says. The prominence of both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin in the recent election showed that women are no longer taking a backseat in the political arena. And cartoons mirror that. “It’s excellent,” Prados-Torreira says. “It reflects the fact that women have a much more active role and they can be criticized, too.”

For the past six years, Prados-Torreira has run a popular political cartoon contest for Columbia students. “The students do wonderful work,” she says. “The level of art is incredible. Students here are so visual. I realize for them history is kind of intimidating. They think of history as something boring that has nothing to do with them. This is a good way to get them to look at history in a different way.”

—Heather Lalley