Katherine Anderson has given invited lectures at the National Museum of Language and the University of Washington, as well as conference papers for Victorians Institute and the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States. She is completing her first monograph, Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain, which is now under contract with The Ohio State University Press. In her teaching, she developed three new courses, creating two different versions of “Victorian Sexualities” for ENG 320: The Long Nineteenth Century and ENG 560: Studies in British Literature, respectively, and “The Rise of the Monster” for ENG 215: British Literature.
Allison Giffen
This past year Allison Giffen has been developing a digital humanities project, co-edited with Lucia Hodgson. In fall 2019 they were pleased to launch their website Critical Childhood Studies: A Long 19C Digital Humanities Project.
This website is committed to gathering and nurturing the growing community of Critical Childhood scholars. It offers several moderated blogs that offer and review new work by scholars in the field. This year, along with her co-editor, she has proposed and moderated panels, roundtables, and special sessions at the major conferences in the field: an MLA 2020 roundtable “Critical Childhood Studies and Intersectionality: The State of the Field”; a special session at C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, titled “Critical Childhood Studies and Disability: Charting Confluences” in which she was to deliver a paper “‘one yeah older’: Narratives of Failed Development and the Figure of the Black Boy in Saint Nicholas Magazine.” (postponed until fall 2020); and forthcoming in Fall, they proposed and will moderate a special seminar session at the American Studies Association titled “Caught in Time: Black Boyhood Criminalization and Revolt.”
Allison Giffen
Allison Giffen recently co-edited the collection Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature. This year she is on professional leave researching her new book on childhood and disability in nineteenth-century US popular literature. She is also collaborating on a digital humanities project in Critical Childhood Studies, that includes a website titled the Critical Childhood Studies Forum, funded through the Hatter award. In addition, she is developing a new upper-level seminar titled “Critical Childhood Studies” which will offer interrogations into representations of childhood in literature, the history and construction of childhood, and children as agents of cultural production. She received a summer grant from the Social Justice and Equity Committee to develop new curriculum in disability studies and is working on a new upper-level seminar in the English department, titled “Disability and Literature.”