VICTORIA FORD SMITH
Associate Professor, Department of English
University of Connecticut, Storrs
Department of English, University of Connecticut
215 Glenbrook Road, U-4025
Storrs, Connecticut 06269-4025
(860) 486-3959, victoria.f.smith[at]uconn.edu
EDUCATION
PhD, 2010, English, Rice University
MA, 2009, English, Rice University
BA, 2003, Literature and Print Journalism, summa cum laude, American University
PROFESSIONAL HISTORY
2018–present
Associate Professor, University of Connecticut
2012–2018
Assistant Professor, University of Connecticut
2010–2012
Lecturer, Rice University, Program for Communication Excellence
2007, 2010
Instructor, Rice University, Department of English
2007–2009
Tutor, Houston Community College Writing Center
RESEARCH INTERESTS
children’s and young adult literature and childhood studies; child-produced culture; nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and culture; material culture; book history and illustration
RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS
Book
Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, UP of Mississippi, 2017. Winner of the Children’s Literature Association Book Award.
Articles and Book Chapters
“Impertinent Pedagogy: A Forum on Mischievous Practice in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture.” Introduction and editorship. The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 45, no. 3, September 2021, pp. 309–49.
“Walking Sideways into Paradise: Desire and Degeneration in Lord Alfred Douglas’s Nonsense.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 59, no. 1, Spring 2021, pp. 49–73.
“Nonsense Poetry.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. Lesa Scholl, Palgrave, 2021.
“Adult.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, second edn., ed. Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, and Nina Christensen, NYU Press, 2021, pp. 1–3.
“Katharine Hull, Pamela Whitlock, and the ‘Ransome Style.’” Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, ed. Rachel Conrad and L. Brown Kennedy, Palgrave, 2021, pp. 203–218.
“Exhibiting Children: The Young Artist as Construct and Creator.” Journal of Juvenilia Studies, vol. 1, 2018, pp. 62–81.
“Return of the Dapper Men and the Nonsense of Neo-Victorian Children’s Literature.” The Victorian Period in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Culture. Ed. Sonya Sawyer Fritz and Sara K. Day, Routledge, 2018. 124–141.
“Art Critics in the Cradle: Fin-de-Siècle Painting Books and the Move to Modernism.” Children’s Literature, vol. 43, 2015, pp. 161–181. Winner of the Children’s Literature Association Article Honor Award.
“Toy Presses and Treasure Maps: Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne as Collaborators.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 26–54.
“Dolls and Imaginative Agency in Bradford, Pardoe, and Dickens.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 40, 2009, pp. 171–97.
Reviews and Other Short Work
Review of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation, by Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti. Biography 41.2 (Spring 2018): 406–10.
“If You Give an Adult a Coloring Book.” Public Books, November 17, 2016.
Blog post on teaching Mr. Holmes (2015, dir. Bill Condon). Streaky Bacon: A Guide to Victorian Adaptations, 31 July 2015.
Review of Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850-1914, by Christopher Parkes. Nineteenth-Century Literature 69.2 (September 2014): 276–80.
“What We Know about What Maisie Knew: A Critical Conversation.” Review of What Maisie Knew (2012, dir. Scott McGehee and David Siegel). Journal of Victorian Culture Online. Web.30 August 2013. In collaboration with Ryan Fong, Kalamazoo College.
Review of “Dickens! Author and Authorship in 2012.” The Dickensian 108.488, Part 3 (Winter 2012): 276–8. In collaboration with Ryan Fong, Kalamazoo College.
“Happy Birthday, Dear Edward.” Victorians Beyond the Academy. Journal of Victorian Culture Online (12 May 2012).
Media Interviews and Community Outreach
Co-host of The Children’s Table Podcast, initiated September 2021. Ongoing.
Invited after-performance speaker on representations of adolescence, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Connecticut Repertory Theatre, 6 December 2014.
Invited radio guest, “If You Give a Kid a Book They Want, They’ll Read It.” Colin Mcenroe Show. WNPR, 14 May 2014.
Interviewee for Jill Martin Wrenn, “Raising Readers: How to Keep Kids Reading through the Summer.” CNN, 27 April 2014.
Works in Progress
Small Modernisms: Children’s Art and the Royal Drawing Society. Book in progress.
Producing Children: Critical Studies in Childhood Agency and Creativity. Edited collection with Pete Kunze. Contributing introduction and chapter on the child subjects and collaborators in Arthur Tress’s The Dream Collector photograph anthology. Under review.
“KidLit from Beyond the Grave: Spiritualism, Child Mediums, and the Haunting Problem of Child Agency” for Alt KidLit: What Children’s Literature Has Been, Never Was, and Might Yet Be, ed. Kenneth Kidd and Derritt Mason, University Press of Mississippi. In production.
“Child Authors: Pets, Pirates, and Professionals” for The Cambridge History of Children’s Literature in English, Vol. 2: 1830–1914, ed. Eugene Giddens and Zoe Jaques.
Presentations
Invited Talks
Panelist for Podcasts and Pedagogies event as co-host of The Children’s Table. Simon Fraser University, March 2023.
“A Nasty, Biting Thing: The Wayward Child as Collaborator.” University of Illinois Center for Children’s Books, October 2020.
“Exhibiting Children: The Young Artist as Construct and Creator in Early Twentieth Century England,” Five Colleges Childhood Studies Seminar, Smith College, October 2017.
“‘Not I’ but We: Robert Louis Stevenson and Creative Collaboration,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 2015.
Refereed Conference Presentations
“Victorian Ragged Children as Saplings in the Gutter”
Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference, Atlanta, GA, June 2022.
“How a Podcast Can Make Child Agency Appear,” The Child and the Book Conference, Valletta, Malta, May 2022.
“The Child Inside Outsider Art,” Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference, virtual, forthcoming June 2021.
“Impertinent Pedagogies: Mischievous Praxis in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture,” organizer and moderator of roundtable, Modern Language Association Annual Conference, virtual, January 2021.
“Angelic Instruments: Child Mediums and the Contradictions of Children’s Vision,” Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Seattle, WA, January 2020.
“The Crab Means Nothing: Lord Alfred Douglas’s Nonsense and the Unspeakability of Same-Sex Desire,” International Research Society for Children’s Literature, Stockholm, Sweden, August 2019.
“Children in the Boer War: Prisoners, Patriots, and a Protestor,” Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference, Indianapolis, IN, June 2019.
“Early Human Figures: Child Artists and the Pleasure of Mistakes,” Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference, San Antonio, TX, June 2018.
Participant in “Showcase of Careers” session, Modern Language Association Annual Conference, New York, NY, January 2018.
“Keyword: Adult,” International Research Society for Children’s Literature Congress, Toronto, July 2017.
“Daphne Allen as Art and Artist: A Study of the Real Child and the Scholar,” Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference, Tampa, FL, June 2017.
“Painting in Miniature: Young Artists, Child Agency, and Questions that Animate the Field,” Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference, Columbus, OH, June 2016.
“Crimson Tentacles and Runcible Birds: Victorian Natural History, the Child Artist, and Nonsense,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Asheville, NC, March 2016.
“Return of the Dapper Men and the Nonsense of Neo-Victorian Literature,” Children’s Literature Association Conference, Richmond, VA, June 2015.
“Talking Trash: Andy Mulligan’s ‘Unnamed Third World Country’ and the Problem of Voice,” Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference, Univ. of South Carolina, June 2014.
“Sketching the Smell of Lemons: Exploring the Senses at the Children’s Royal Academy,” Northeast Victorian Studies Association, Stony Brook University, April 2014.
“Art Critics in the Cradle: Fin-de-Siècle Painting Books and the Move to Modernism,” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Chicago, Illinois, January 2014.
“Scribble-Minded Sages or Mere Copyists: Child Artists and the Play of Modernism,” Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference, Biloxi, Mississippi, June 2013.
“Dickens as Mamie Recalls Him, and Mamie As We Recall Her,” Sketches for Bob: Papers in Honor of Robert Lowry Patten, Rice University, October 2012 and Dickens! Author and Authorship in 2012, University of California–Santa Cruz, July 2012
“Active Listeners: Child Auditors and the Victorian Storyteller,” NAVSA Annual Conference, seminar, Vanderbilt University, November 2011.
“Captains and Codfish: Collaboration and the Powerful Child Imagination in Barrie’s Peter Pan,” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Philadelphia, December 2009.
“Toy Presses and Treasure Maps,” Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference, UNC Charlotte, June 2009.
“Mapping Treasure Island: The Collaborative Landscape of R. L. Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne,” Dickens Universe Winter Conference, Vanderbilt University, February 2009.
“Nonsense Verse, the Linguistic Fall, and Post-Epic Victorians,” Poetry in the Age of the Novel, Victorian Studies Conference, University of Houston, March 2007.
“Miniaturization, Magnification, and Jenny Wren’s Dolls in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend,” Things/Matter, English Department Symposium, Rice University, March 2006.
EDITORIAL EXPERIENCE
2015–present
Book Review Co-editor, The Lion and the Unicorn
2015–2019
Editor, Streaky Bacon: A Guide to Victorian Adaptations
2019–2020
Editorial Consultant, Adam Matthew Children’s Literature and Culture Digital Resource
2005–2007
Editorial Fellow, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900
2004–2005
Editorial Fellow, Feminist Economics
TEACHING
Graduate Seminars, University of Connecticut
ENGL 5150: Advanced Research Methods
ENGL 5160: Professional Development
ENGL 6345: Around 1900: Apes, Aesthetes, and Auras in British Literature & Culture
ENGL 6345: Growing Up Victorian
ENGL 5200: Children’s Literature
ENGL 6200: Becoming Boys: Children’s Literature and Masculinity
ENGL 6200: Small Wonders: Childhood and Scholarly Inquiry
Undergraduate Courses, University of Connecticut
ENGL 2101: British Literature II
ENGL 3119: Modern British Literature
ENGL 3420: Children’s Literature
ENGL 3422: Young Adult Literature
ENGL 4600W: Fairy Tales and Adaptations
Independent Studies, University of Connecticut
The Gothic Child (graduate-level)
Young Adult Literature, Trauma, and Mental Illness (graduate-level)
Child Agency and Child-Produced Culture (graduate-level)
Reading and Researching Young Adult Literature (graduate-level)
Masculinity in Young Adult Literature
British and American Women Writers
Death in Children’s Literature
Gothic Children’s and Young Adult Literature (graduate-level)
Undergraduate Courses, Rice University
ENG 175: Global Modernism and Its Successors
ENG 271: Survey of Children’s Literature
SERVICE
Selected Service to the Profession
2020–present
Children’s Literature Association, Board of Directors
2018
Children’s Literature Association, Graduate Student Essay Prize Committee
2017–2020
Children’s Literature Association, Chair of Article Award Committee|
2014–17
Children’s Literature Association, Article Award Committee
University Service
2020
UConn, CLAS Dean’s Vision Implementation Committee
2019–2021
UConn, Programming Committee, Maurice Sendak Collection
2017
UConn, Malka Penn Award Committee, human rights in children’s literature
2015–2017
UConn, Humanities Institute Junior Faculty Forum Co-convener
2012
Rice University, Steering Committee, Center for Written, Oral, and Visual Communication
Departmental Service
2019–present
UConn, Department of English, Director of Graduate Studies
2018–2019
UConn, Department of English, Subcommittee on Governance Documents
2017–present
UConn, Department of English, Executive Committee
2015–2019
UConn, Department of English, Associate Director of Graduate Studies
2014–present
UConn, Department of English, Graduate Executive Committee
2014–2015
UConn, Department of English, Courses and Curriculum Committee
2013–2015
UConn, Department of English, Honors Program Committee
2012–2018
UConn, Department of English, Job Market Committee
2012–present
UConn, Department of English, Aetna Children’s Literature Award Committee
2009
Rice, Department of English, Co-organize, Poetry & Poetics Colloquium
2006–2007
Rice, Department of English, Graduate Symposium Co-organizer
Awards
2019
Children’s Literature Association Book Award (for Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature)
2017
Children’s Literature Association Article Honor Award (for “Art Critics in the Cradle: Fin-de-Siècle Painting Books and the Move to Modernism”)
2010
Chair’s Dissertation Prize, Rice University
2009–2010
Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughn Fellowship, Rice University
2009–2010
Rice Humanities Research Center Sarofim Teaching Fellowship (declined due to conflict with the Vaughn Fellowship)
2007
Dunlevie Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Rice University
Professional Memberships
Children’s Literature Association
Modernist Studies Association
North American Victorian Studies Association
Modern Language Association
Victoria Ford Smith 