Centre for the History of Childhood: Becoming a Person, 4 July 2009

Summer Common Room, Magdalen College, High Street, Oxford UK
Orgainized by Professor Laurence Brockliss and Professor George Rousseau. The conference probes concepts of personhood and identity in history.

9:30 – 9:45 Registration in the Summer Common Room

9:45 Introduction and Welcome by Laurence Brockliss (Magdalen College Oxford)

10:00 Olympia Bobou (Brasenose College Oxford), ‘A pais is a pais is a pais: the language of growing up in ancient Greece'

10:45 Sophie Oosterwijk (St Andrews University), ‘Cleansing power: Baptism and the medieval child’

11:30 TEA BREAK

12:00 George Rousseau (Magdalen College Oxford), 'Is Tristram Shandy a Person? Notions and Counter-notions of Personhood in the Enlightenment'

12:45 LUNCH in the New Room, Magdalen College

2:15 Laurence Brockliss (Magdalen College Oxford) and Richard Brown (Dalhousie University), ‘Marks of Personhood: Are Feral Children Human?’

Guest Chairs: Diane Smyth (St Mary’s Hospital, Imperial College Healthcare, London) and Lyn Fry (Psychologist)

3:00 Heather Montgomery (Open University), ‘Becoming a being: before or after birth? The anthropological evidence’.

3:45 AFTERNOON TEA BREAK

4:15 Dominic Wilkinson (Green Templeton and the Ethox Centre, Oxford): ‘Premature infants, late-term fetuses, viability and moral status'

5:00 Summing Up

5:30 CONFERENCE ENDS

The cost of attendance will be £30 for those who wish to take lunch in the New Room. For those simply wishing to attend the colloquium, there will be a charge of £10 to cover administration costs and tea and coffee. Cheques should be made out to ‘Magdalen College’ and sent to Laurence Brockliss at Magdalen College, Oxford, OX1 4AU

For more information, go to the Centre for the History of Childhood page.

Trinity Term Schedule

Please note that our meeting day and time has changed to Mondays at 5:15 PM in order to prevent clashes with other seminars, in particular our friends at the History of Childhood seminars. We will still meet in Room 11 of the English Faculty Building. All are very welcome! A map and directions to the English Faculty Building can be found here.

Monday, 4 May (week 2):
Barack Obama, Superhero: U.S Presidents, Comic Books, and the Heroic Imaginary
Brian Johnsrud, Hertford College, Oxford
Hertford graduate student and Rhodes Scholar Brian Johnsrud discusses Barack Obama’s disproportionate coverage in graphic novels and superhero television programs such as Heroes and Smallville. This talk suggests that America’s election of President Obama may have revealed not only a new historical precedent, but also a glimpse of how the cultural view of heroes is evolving.

Monday, 18 May (week 4):
Dark Horses: The Lives of Anna Sewell and Black Beauty
Dr Adrienne Gavin, Canterbury Christ Church University
Canterbury Christ Church University Reader in English Literature and Sewell biographer Adrienne Gavin discusses the lives of metaphorical dark horse Anna Sewell and her dark horse creation, Black Beauty, which became a phenomenon in fiction.

Monday, 1 June (week 6):
Low-Rent Boyfriends and Social-Climbing Sisters: Class, Sexuality, and Transgression in Gossip Girl
Ryan Richard Thoreson, Hertford College, Oxford
Rhodes Scholar Ryan Thoreson, a graduate student at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, examines the concept of transgression in the teen television dramedy Gossip Girl. He focuses especially on the roles of class and sexuality in both establishing boundaries and providing ways to cross them.

Monday, 15 June (week 8):
Disney's Alice, Hello Kitty's Alice, and Carroll's Alice: An Aspect of Children's Cultures in the US, UK, and Japan
Yasuko Natsume, Tsuda College, Tokyo
This talk examines American and Japanese animated film adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a means of accessing children's cultures in the US, UK, and Japan. Natsume's paper focuses on Disney’s self-supporting, independent Alice (who stands in contrast to the majority of early Disney princesses) and Sanrio’s 1993 Hello Kitty™ version, in which Kitty, a Japanese symbol of cuteness, plays the part of Alice.

Place and Space Conference Begins!

The Place and Space in Children's Literature Conference opens this evening with Philip Pullman's keynote speech in Keble College's O'Reilly Theatre. This weekend we will welcome over 100 delegates representing institutions in more than thirteen countries to Oxford, including some of the most eminent names in children's literature studies. Prof. Peter Hunt, Prof. Maria Nikolajeva, Dr. Farah Mendlesohn, and many other children's literature academics will be speaking and participating during what promises to be a very rich conference.

Conference Registration, Panelist List, and Programme Up!

Conference registration for the Place and Space in Children's Literature Conference, organized by the CLYCC, is now open at http://placeandspace.org/. This conference will take place on 27 -28 March, 2009 in Keble College, University of Oxford, and will feature the work of established academics and young scholars from around the world. Panels range from the place of Oxford in children's literature to text/image interplay in picture books to themes of postcolonial identity and cultural displacement in works for young people. There will also be a special session on working in the field of children's literature studies. More information on the panels, panelists, and conference programme can be found at http://placeandspace.org/programme/.

Late registration fees will apply after 15 February, 2009.

*There are a limited number of individual tickets available for the keynote speech, which will take place at 17:30 on Friday, 27 March in Keble College’'s O’Reilly Theatre. For those people that would like to attend Pullman’s talk only, these tickets are £3 each. For more information, go to http://placeandspace.org/registration/pullman-keynote/.

Hilary (Winter) Term 2009 Schedule

Thursdays, 5:00 PM in Room 11 of the English Faculty Building. All are very welcome!

Thursday, 29 January (week 2):
Rogue Heroes in History: Tricksters in William Godwin's
Early-Nineteenth Century Children's Books
Dr. Malini Roy, Keble College Oxford
Recent graduate of Keble College Malini Roy discusses her doctoral work on Romantic-era political theorist William Godwin. Roy considers how underdog figures in Godwin's books for children challenge and undo structures of oppressive authority, reflecting his anti-establishment politics in the post-French Revolutionary context.


Thursday, 12 February (week 4):
Exploratory Play and the Bid for Freedom in Arthur Ransome's
Swallows and Amazons
Hazel Sheeky, Newcastle University and the National Maritime Museum
Responding to concept of play as a rehearsal for later life, AHRC Collaborative PhD student Hazel Sheeky considers how far play in Ransome's series challenges the notion of inevitable progression from child to adult.


Thursday, 26 February (week 6):
Big Book News or Big Bad Wolves?: 21st Century Children’s Publishing
Dr. Claire Squires, Senior Lecturer in Publishing,
Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, Oxford Brookes University
Dr. Squires explores some of the key issues around children’s publishing today, including how publishers harness the powers of social networking, multimedia synergies and character licensing; concerns about literacy and reading enjoyment (particularly among boys); distaste about celebrity ‘authorship’; and anxieties that the sector has been hijacked by big corporate publishers.


Thursday, 12 March (week 8):
Dreaming the World: Mirror worlds in Neil Gaiman's
Coraline and Mirrormask
Iain Emsley, Independent Researcher
Independent researcher Iain Emsley considers how Neil Gaiman reworks and develops Carrollesque looking-glass worlds in the mirrors of Coraline and Mirrormask, focusing on the girl protagonists’ roles in constructing such universes through curiosity and imagination.

Hilary Term CLYCC CfP

The University of Oxford CLYCC is now soliciting paper proposals for its Hilary (winter) term seminar series. The CLYCC is a welcoming, exciting community in which to present your current work on topics in children's literature and youth culture studies. Academics, graduates, and high-level undergraduates from Oxford and beyond are all very welcome to send brief (200-300 word) proposals or informal statements of interest in the body of an email to maria[dot]cecire[at]keble[dot]ox[dot]ac[dot]uk by 19 December 2009.

Areas of study may include (but are not limited to) literary criticism, children's / young adult publishing, youth culture, and media studies.

CLYCC talks take place on Thursdays at 5:00pm, and papers are usually 20-40 minutes long, followed by a discussion.

*Please note that the CLYCC seminar series is different from the CLYCC's Place and Space in Children's Literature Conference, which will run 27-28 March, 2009 at Keble College, Oxford. Abstract submissions to the conference is now closed. For registration information, see http://placeandspace.org*

Lecture: Children's Literature and the Academy

On Monday, 17 November at 4:00PM, Keble Fellow and Tutor Diane Purkiss will give a lecture entitled "Children's Literature and the Academy" in Lecture Theatre 2 of the English Faculty Building. This talk is aimed primarily at undergraduates, and will discuss the place of children's literature in academia. The lecture will be particularly pertinent to those students that are interested in pursuing children's literature studies at any point during their academic career, including during their time at Oxford. DPhil candidate and Keble Lecturer Maria Cecire will also be on hand to weigh in on working in this unique field.