The following is an overview of the panel formations for the conference ‘Devils and Dolls: Dichotomous Depictions of the Child’. Please note that this is a DRAFT only, and could be subject to change. Sessions will be run in parallel sets of 2. Therefore sessions 1 & 2, 3 & 4, 13 & 14 and so on will occur at the same time. We advise against printing off this version, as you will be supplied with a fresh, updated programme, complete with times and room locations at registration on the day.
WEDNESDAY 27TH 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: Louisa Yates
‘There is no good or evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it’[1]: The boy criminal, the boy detective and the adult/child hierarchy in children’s popular fiction.
Lucy Andrew [Cardiff University]
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]
Session 3: Through the Looking Glass: the Child and the Gaze
Chair: Eva Gordon
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 4: Representing the “Truth”: the Child as subject
Chair: Maria Holmgren Troy
Monster, Victim, Boy or Murderer? Representations of Children Who Kill in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers
Eleanor Betts [QMU, London]
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]
Session 5: Grimm Beginnings: 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]
No Strings: education and agency in Pinocchio, or how to become a real boy
Dr Sam George [University of Hertfordshire]
Session 6: “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]
"Little does my darling know": infant intoxication in Sara Coleridge's Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children
Jo Taylor [Keele University]
‘The game of the moment’: the devilment of innocence in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.
Dr Charlie White [Independent Researcher]
THURSDAY 28th MARCH
Session 7: Re(en)visioning the Child
Chair: Ivan Phillips
Grendel, a child “mara þonne ænig man oðer”: the dichotomous representation of the monster Grendel in Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf adaptation’
Joseph White [University of Manchester]
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’sMacbeth
James Alsop [University of Exeter]
Session 8: The Dysfunctional Metaphor
Chair: Pete Newbon
I Want to Stay and I Don’t Know Why I Can’t: The Essential Voice of Sally Draper in Mad Men.
Eva Gordon [Saint Louis University, Madrid]
Gothic Transgressors and Child Psychosis: Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy.
Martyn Colebrook [University of Hull]
Contrasting images of children in Margaret Atwood's Fiction
Professor Teresa Gibert [UNED, Spain]
Session 9: On the threshold: the Liminal Child
Chair: Sam George
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]
“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 10: Freud’s Child - Queering the uncanny
Chair: Catriona McAra
Grasping Uncanniness to Become the Child
Professor Annie Smalley [Community College, Qatar]
Innocents?: Children in the Early Fiction of A. L. Barker
Kate C.Jones [University of East Anglia]
‘I am Reborn’: Familial and Societal Reactions to Queer Children in neo-Victorian fiction.
Dr Louisa Yates [University of Chester]
Session 11: Toy Soldiers: Politicising the “foreign” Child
Chair: Georgie Payne?
When Children Give Voice to the Prisoner: First-person Narratives in Feride Çiçekoğlu's Don't Let them Shoot the Kite
Nicola Verderame [Leiden University, The Netherlands]
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]
Session 12: Talking Taboo: Attraction, Repulsion and Censorship
Chair: Sandra Dinter
What can an image do? Visual Pleasures and the Child in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Joanna Kellond [University of Sussex]
“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
Session 13: Into the Doll’s House
Chair: Sarah Wood
When Porcelain cracks: from Doll to Devil in Modern Literature
Jen Baker [University of Bristol]
Undressing the Doll’s Dressmaker: Jenny Wren’s Critique of Childhood, Femininity and Appearance
Ben Moore, [University of Manchester]
All Dolled-Up
Professor Heather Brown-Hudson [Lindenwood University, St Louis, USA]
Session 14: Precarious spaces – displacing the Child
Chair: Jessica Campbell
‘Revolution is like Saturn’: children as metaphors of unsettlement
Dr Ivan Phillips [University of Hertfordshire]
“Picturing the young ‘Other’: The Ambivalence of Augustus F. Sherman’s Child Portraits”
Klara-Stephanie Szlezák [University of Regensburg, Germany] UNCONFIRMED
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]