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.”