19 October (Week 2): Start-of-Year Drinks and Informational Session.
Come meet fellow scholars of children’s literature and youth culture studies. As always, all levels (including undergraduates and those new to the field) are most welcome.
2 November (Week 4): ‘Telling Stories at Campfire: Trying out Graphic Novels in Globalised India’.
Dr. Malini Roy, Independent Scholar.
Roy, an alumna of Keble College, Oxford, looks at the Campfire graphic novels for young readers being currently produced in India, where the genre boasts few published titles as yet. This talk addresses the peculiar dynamics governing this avant garde publishing venture in India's post- globalisation context, where the culture of leisure reading in English, traditionally associated with social privilege, is changing and expanding rapidly yet retains discernible links to the past.
16 November (Week 6): ‘At the Back of George MacDonald: Romanticism, Fairy Tales and the Redemptive Child’.
Prof. Bill Gray, University of Chichester.
Professor Bill Gray discusses George MacDonald's nineteenth-century children's works in relation to Romantic ideas about fairy tales and the redemptive power of children. Gray, who studied literature, philosophy and theology at the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and Princeton, is an expert in children's fantasy. His publications include the books Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann and Death and Fantasy: Essays on George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman and R.L. Stevenson.
30 November (Week 8): ‘Playing Dangerously: Transformational Moments in Children's Play within a Global Television Culture’.
Abby Loebenberg, Hertford College.
Social anthropologist, Rhodes Scholar, and Hertford DPhil candidate Abby Loebenberg discusses the findings of her 12-month ethnographic study in Vancouver, Canada on the consumption of commercial Japanese animated television and toys with multi-ethnic children up to age 11. Her work includes a detailed look this material in terms of how we theorise childhood anthropologically, the dangers of space and morality, playing pretend, using play for emotional growth and transformative play.
