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We host four research cluster talks per year which are given by a wide range of experts in the field of children’s literature and are open to anyone who wishes to attend.

Forthcoming Cluster Talks
Recent Cluster Talks
Past Cluster Talks

FORTHCOMING CLUSTER TALKS

1-2pm Wednesday 27 January 2010
Dr.Malini Roy, Oxford
William Godwin’s ‘Juvenile Library’: Re(ad)dressing Romantic-Era Children’s Literature

This talk will highlight the linguistic innovativeness of a series of children’s books written by William Godwin for the ‘Juvenile Library,’ a publishing house and bookshop that he operated in London between 1805 and 1825. While Godwin is known as a major Romantic-era political philosopher and novelist, the children’s literature he wrote and also commissioned from friends such as Charles and Mary Lamb has not yet been fully explored in terms of its importance in the history of children’s literature. This talk attempts to redress this neglect by focusing upon those children’s books that Godwin wrote, and arguing that they evince certain rhetorical practices of linguistic play which are as imaginative as the Victorian nonsense writing of Carroll and Lear, produced in the so-called Golden Age of children’s literature.

RECENT CLUSTER TALKS 2008-9

Professor Peter Hunt, Cardiff
‘Editing Children's Classics: footnotes from the cutting-room floor’
23 November 2009

Peter Hunt has been editing and annotating Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island, and The Secret Garden for the Oxford University Press World’s Classics series  This has taken him into many curious and unlikely rabbit-holes and backwaters, and this talk explores the more diverting of these, and looks at the principles and practicalities of producing new editions of the ‘classics’.

Dr. Garry Marvin, Roehampton
‘Wolves in Children’s Literature: An anthropologist’s view’
26 October 2009

Garry Marvin is a social anthropologist who specialises in human-animal relationships. His previous research has included studies of zoos and the bullfight in Spain, and he is currently researching recreational hunting as a cultural practice. Garry is in the final stages of writing a book on human-wolf relationships in which he touches on how wolves are represented in literature. He will offer some thoughts on how images of wolves have been constructed in different cultures and at different times and explore this in the context of children's literature. The focus will be on how people have imagined wolves, and Garry looks forward to a discussion with an audience of children’s literature specialists on the role of wolves in stories for children.

Dr Gillian Lathey of the NCRCL, Roehampton
'Don Quixote in 'sunny Spain': the mediation of national and cultural identity in children's literature'.
2 June 2009

The final cluster talk of the year, at the invitation of, and hosted by, the Hispanic Studies Research Centre, is on  The figure of Don Quixote has a long history in British children's literature. From the first, substantially abridged, editions of the novel published exclusively for children in 1776 and 1778 to James Baldwin's Stories of Don Quixote Written Anew for Children  of 2007, the adventures of the errant knight have delighted young readers for well over two hundred years. But how are Spain and Spanish culture represented in these texts? When examined from the perspectives of image studies, children's editions of Don Quixote published across the twentieth century offer intriguing insights into the mediation of cultural and national identity in children's books.

Virginia Lowe
Talk on her recently published book, Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two children tell (Routledge, 2007)
30 March 2009

Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Professor of English Emerita, Holy Names University, California:
'Chivalric Stories Told to Edwardian Children.'
9 December 2008
Medieval chivalric stories retold for Edwardian children appeal and significantly rival the imaginative books for which this Golden Age is noted. The Middle Ages inspired medievalists like Tolkien and Lewis, who influenced today’s fantasy. The point of medieval narratives – romance, epic, saga, chronicle, legend – is to evoke the past as inspiration toward an ideal that informs character and elevates action. Children’s books of chivalric stories afford breathtaking examples of Edwardian extravagance in publishing, and similarly attractive schoolbooks served those who could not afford fine editions. Their number and beauty show the appeal of old tales and their efficacy in communicating racial/national identity. Illustrations, including reproductions of historical paintings that provide acquaintance with great visual artists, reinforced and glossed verbal texts.

Professor Perry Nodelman is one of the most esteemed critics working in the field of children's literature. He is the editor of Canadian Children's Literature and is particularly well known for his seminal text on picture books, Words About Pictures (1988). In his cluster talk, Professor Nodelman discussed picture books in which the main characters are various kinds of food (a much shorter version of this talk appeared in the May/June 06 Horn Book) – an intriguing subject which was both illuminating and entertaining.

Judith Graham: 'Illustrating Aesop'
Monday 23 April 2007

Judith Graham is a freelance specialist in children’s literature and is a renowned expert on picture books. She has published widely in the field and taught on the subject for many years at Roehampton University. Judith used to be a regular tutor on the Visual Texts module, an option on our MA in Children’s Literature, so we were pleased to welcome her back for this cluster talk. She is currently working on a research project about the illustration of Aesop’s Fables and shared her findings with us during an engaging and fascinating talk.

Kimberly Safford: ‘Research in practice: designing small-scale methodology’
Monday 13 February 2006

The session discussed aims, questions and data collection from school-based research projects that examined children’s development as readers and writers, and offered ideas to support participants in developing own small-scale research projects.   

Before coming to Roehampton, Kimberly Safford was the research officer at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, where she co-authored Boys on the Margin: promoting boys’ literacy learning at Key Stage 2 (2004), Animating Literacy: inspiring children’s learning through teacher and artist partnerships (2005) and Many Routes to Meaning: children’s language and literacy learning in creative arts projects (2006).  

This talk was part of the Research Methods course and was of particular interest to students taking the ‘Children as Readers' module.

Natasha Baker: ‘A Thief for All Ages: Thieves and Stealing in Fiction for Children’
Monday 5 December 2005 

Natasha Baker is a graduate of the MA in Children’s Literature at Roehampton. Pirates, smugglers, pickpockets, bandits, kidnappers, burglars and robbers have lurked both around the edges and at the centre of books for children for at least the last 300 years, yet curiously very little academic attention has been paid to this stock figure in children’s fiction. This cluster talk explored shifting constructions of this popular and ubiquitous figure in texts for children published from 1650 to the present day. 

Fiona Collins and Cathy Svensson: ‘Planting a Seed for Life’
Monday 31 January 2005

Fiona Collins and Cathy Svensson of the Education Faculty at Roehampton University talked about a research project to evaluate the long-term benefits and effects of the Bookstart scheme (where babies were given a bag of books at their eight-month checkup) by following children who received the packs into nursery and reception in 2003/04.

Dr Susan Rowland: 'Jungian Literary Theory, Ecocriticism and Children's Literature' 
Monday 6 December 2004

Dr Susan Rowland is Reader in English and Jungian Studies at the University of Greenwich. She is also Chair of the International Association for Jungian Studies. Her publications include C.G. Jung And Literary Theory (Palgrave, 1999), Jung: A Feminist Revision (Polity, 2002), From Agatha Christie To Ruth Rendell (Palgrave, 2000), and Jung as a Writer (Routledge, 2005) 

Marian Keene: 'Eve Garnett's The Family on One End Street'
Monday 10 May 2004