D.B. Dowd
D.B. Dowd is a scholar, critic, and maker working at the intersection of illustration and graphic design. Princeton University Press published his book “Reading Pictures: A Cultural History of Illustration” in 2026. The project tells the story of illustration as a dimension of and contributor to the rise of reading in North America, Europe, and East Asia from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first.
Dowd serves as chair of undergraduate design in the College of Art and professor of design and American culture studies at Washington University. He teaches in the MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture program and the undergraduate communication design major. He also serves as the faculty director of the Dowd Illustration Research Archive (DIRA), named in his honor in 2016. DIRA collects materials associated with 19th and 20th century illustration and comics.
Dowd publishes books and zines under his imprint Spartan Holiday.
His book “A is for Autocrat: A Trumpian Alphabet, Illustrated” (Spartan Holiday Books, 2020) won a national gold Addy award from the American Advertising Federation in 2021. Illustrations from “Spartan Holiday,” Dowd’s illustrated travel journal, have been juried into American Illustration and Society of Illustrators annuals.
He earned a Bachelor of Arts in history from Kenyon College in 1983, and a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1989.
Select Articles, Chapters, and Publications
A history of illustration from the beginning of popular print to the rise of mass literacy and into today’s age of digital media.
Of all the visual arts, illustration shares a unique relationship with the written word, often serving to visualize, enhance, or respond to a text. Reading Pictures presents a global history of this versatile art form, linking its emergence to modern developments such as the illustrated news, recreational reading, and ad-driven consumer culture.
Richly illustrated with more than four hundred images spanning the iconic to the unexpected, Reading Pictures reframes the story of illustration within the broader histories of race, gender, literacy, and the transmission of cultural memory. It reveals how reading and looking have become increasingly integrated, and that, as images have become ever more prevalent today with the digital revolution, what is meant by literacy has evolved.
