Here is the draft programme for the Devils and Dolls conference this March:
Plenary speakers:
Professor George Rousseau, (Magdalen College, University of Oxford)
Dr Anna Green (University of East Anglia, Norwich Castle Museum)
WEDNESDAY 27 MARCH
Session 1: The Devil’s in the Details: Depictions of Monstrous Children
Chair: Jen Baker
A ‘Voodoo Doll in Diapers’ or a ‘Compliant Ready-Made Child’? (Ab)Normal Childhoods in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)
Sandra Dinter [Leibniz University, Hanover]
‘Forbidden Knowledge’: Tampering with Reproduction and Creating Monstrous Children
Caroline Egan [Trinity College, Dublin]
The Vampire Child: Predator and Prey
Professor Maria Holmgren Troy [Karlstad University, Sweden]
Session 2: Alternate Perspectives: Children’s Fiction
Chair: Pete Newbon
Disabling Virtues: Disability, the Child and Children’s Fiction
Dr Sarah Wood [Birmingham City University]
Little girls lost (with scary powers): how do children respond to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Roald Dahl’s Matilda?
Dr Julia Round & Dr James Pope [Bournemouth University]
“The headmistress is a vampire!” Reflections on the cathartic role of Misty as a navigational aid through puberty
Professor Andrew Melrose and Catherine Patten, [University of Winchester]
Session 3: Toy Soldiers: Politicising the “foreign” Child
Chair: Georgie Payne
The Child as ‘the oppressed’: Rereading the modern child in Hindu/Urdu fiction
Saudamini Deo [Jadavpur University, Bengal]
Barbed Wire and Lead Soldiers: Child Protagonists in Holocaust Literature
Lia Deromedi [Royal Holloway, University of London]
“Picturing the young ‘Other’: The Ambivalence of Augustus F. Sherman’s Child Portraits”
Klara-Stephanie Szlezák [University of Regensburg, Germany]
Session 4: On the threshold: the Liminal Child
Chair: Sarah Wood
Young Prophets and Child Demoniacs: the spiritual liminality of childhood in the early modern world
Dr Anna French [Honorary Research Fellow University of Birmingham & University of Gloucestershire]
Who Has Stolen the Child’s Dream?: From J.M. Barrie’s Neverland to Jeunet and Caro’s The City of Lost Children.
María Casado Villanueva, [University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain]
A Child on the Move: The Mapping of American Heterotopias in Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S.Spivet
Olga Tarapata [University of Cologne, Germany]
Session 5 : “And where thy dark eye glances”: the Nineteenth-Century Child
Chair: Liz Renes
‘From Idolatry to Iconoclasm: Transgression and Reparation in Wordsworth’s Childhoods’
Dr Pete Newbon [Northumbria University]
‘The game of the moment’: the devilment of innocence in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.
Dr Charlie White [Independent Researcher]
Undressing the Doll’s Dressmaker: Jenny Wren’s Critique of Childhood, Femininity and Appearance
Ben Moore, [University of Manchester]
THURSDAY 28 MARCH
Session 6: Re(en)visioning the Child
Chair: Saudamini Deo
Seeing No Evil? Traces of Wickedness in the Lands of Oz
Jessica Campbell [University of Washington, USA]
From “Foul” Witches to “Fair” Waifs: The Ghost Children of Michael Boyd’s Macbeth
James Alsop [University of Exeter]
‘Revolution is like Saturn’: children as metaphors of unsettlement
Dr Ivan Phillips [University of Hertfordshire]
Session 7 : Deceptive Appearances
Chair: Dr Catriona McAra
Deceptive Appearances: the Mask of the Monstrous Child
Jen Baker [University of Bristol]
Contrasting images of children in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction
Professor Teresa Gibert [UNED, Spain]
Innocents?: Children in the Early Fiction of A. L. Barker
Kate C.Jones [University of East Anglia]
Session 8: Society’s Child
Chair: Maria Holmgren Troy
A study of the representation and reception of children as subjects of crime news
Georgie Payne [Loughborough University]
The ‘Before and After’ Child in the Barnardos Children pictures
Gavin Maitland [V&A Museum, London]
The ‘wonder of all Wonders’: Fasting Girls as Providential Wonders in Early Modern England.
Sarah Watkins [Birkbeck, London]
Session 9: Through the Looking Glass: the Child and the Gaze
Chair: Jessica Campbell
Portrait D’Enfants: John Singer Sargent and the aesthetic Child.
Liz Renes [University of York]
The Problem with Innocence: reading the child in Charles Dodgson’s photographs
Jessica Sage [University of Reading]
Looking at Japanese schoolchildren- Photographs of children in uniforms
Aurore Montoya [University of the West of England]
Session 10: Into the Doll’s House: The Child in Fairy tale
Chair: Ben Moore
“The Punish”: Sadeian Games in the Fairy Tales of Kate Bernheimer
Dr Catriona McAra [University of Huddersfield]
‘It’s almost as if they want to be eaten’: Sinful and virtuous Red Riding Hoods in Sisters Red.
Nicola Burke [University of Western Sydney]
‘The Commodification and Consumption of the child: dolls, fairy tales and Little Orphan Annie in selected poetry of Anne Sexton’
Nicola Presley [Bath Spa University]
Session 11: Talking Taboo: Attraction, Repulsion and Censorship
Chair: Sandra Dinter
“Daisy Miller, Bottled-lightening Girl: Applying William James and G. Stanley Hall to Winterbourne’s Erotically Charged ‘Study’ of Daisy Miller”
Karrie Ann Grobben
The paradox of the innocent child in shunga (sex art) and the sexualised child in Utamaro’s mother and child prints.
Louise Boyd
‘I am Reborn’: Familial and Societal Reactions to Queer Children in neo-Victorian fiction.
Dr Louisa Yates [University of Chester]
