Research

My research explores cultural constructions of childhood, the lived experiences of children, and paradigms of children’s power and creative agency. I’m especially interested in young people’s participation in the literary and visual arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mostly in England.

In other words, I like thinking about children (mostly the ones who were living around 1900), the things those children did (like invent secret languages and draw pictures that the modernists tried to steal), and the ways adults write about the things those children did.

My first book, Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2017), reframes children as powerful forces in the production of their own literature and culture by uncovering a tradition of collaborations between adults and children. To illuminate the contours of those collaborations, I investigate everything from Robert Louis Stevenson’s toy press printing ventures with his stepson, Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, to the emergence of the Royal Drawing Society, an organization that Prince Albert affectionately dubbed the Children’s Royal Academy.

The Royal Drawing Society is the subject of my in-progress second book, tentatively titled Small Modernisms: Children’s Art and the Royal Drawing Society. During its 100-year history, the RDS enjoyed the patronage of an impressive roster of notables, including Princess Louise, King George, Frederic Leighton, John Tenniel, Edward Burne-Jones, and Robert Baden-Powell, as well as presidents and board members of museums, galleries, and artist and education societies. Its rich archive documents how the society and the young artists who hung their work in its exhibits engaged with new visual technologies such as photography and film, navigated changing ideologies of empire and nation, registered the unrepresentable trauma and violence of WWI, and participated in the rise of radical experiments in art in the first decades of the twentieth century. While the RDS is worthy of deep study for its own sake, in Small Modernisms I argue that the Society usefully complicates the stories we typically tell about the role of childhood, and real children, in the huge cultural shifts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I’ve published pieces of those projects as well as other scholarship in childhood, Victorian, and juvenilia studies. You can find my work in Children’s Literature, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, The Lion and the Unicorn, Dickens Studies Annual, The Journal of Juvenilia Studies, and Victorian Poetry, as well as in selected edited collections. See my CV for more details.