Conceptions of Girlhood Now and Then: "Girls' Literature" and Beyond
An international conference at Linnæus University, Växjö, Sweden, 6th–8th of October 2020
Upcoming: a conference issue of Barnboken
There will be a themed journal issue of the journal Barnboken that focuses on the conference theme. For more information, please see: https://barnboken.net/index.php/clr/call-girlhood
News!
Dear participant,
Due to the Corona pandemic, we have decided to turn our conference into an entirely digital conference. This means that everyone will take part in the conference from home/their office. We would of course love to see you in person, but under the current circumstances this is our best option.
- Sadly, one of our keynotes, Maria Margareta Österholm, will not be able to take part in the conference. Instead, we have the pleasure to announce that we will have an evening activity focused on Swedish author Astrid Lindgren's famous character Pippi Longstocking. During this event, Lisa Källström, who has just finished a doctoral thesis about Pippi, will give a lecture called "Pippi as Bullfighter: Illustrations as Medialized Spectacles". You will also get the opportunity to ask Lisa about her presentation and Pippi! And there will be recipes available, so that you can make your own children's literature themed food and snacks for the event
- If you would like to take part in the conference as a listener, please send an e-mail to girlsliteratureandbeyond@lnu.se. Do NOT use the registration link - that link is only for keynotes, paper presenters and organisers.
- We will use the e-meeting platform Zoom for the conference, please see below for more information on "how that works"!
- There will be a conference publication. The CFP will be sent out when it is ready.
- We are still fine-tuning the schedule, but a preliminary version is available - see below under "Programme"!
- Remember – the conference schedule mentions the time slots in Swedish time (CEST)! There are convenient converters of time differences available online if you need some help!
- The papers will be held live during the conference, so you do not need to pre-record your paper.
- It is really important that you stick to the time limit. You will be muted when your time has run out.
- We will soon send out conference packages to the address you have mentioned in your registration (invited speakers, paper presenters and organisers only).
- Please send us a guide on how to pronounce your name no later than the 15th of September.
- There is a bit more space in the programme than we originally thought there would be. If you have been told earlier that your paper will be 10 minutes long you now have two options:
1) To talk for 20 minutes instead.
2) To talk for 10 minutes and get more time for feedback.
Please let us know no later than the 15th of September which option you prefer! - We have created a Facebook group for the conference: Conceptions of Girlhood! Join us if you want to share links, suggested readings, your recipes or something else related to the conference and/or girls' literature in general!
We are looking forward to seeing you virtually in October. Please do not hesitate to send your questions our way if there is something that seems unclear! And please take a look at the conference website regularly - we have a few surprises that will be revealed very soon!
Last but not least: thank you to our financiers Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ), The Crafoord Foundation and Linnaeus University for making this conference possible!
Best wishes and stay safe,
The conference committee
Keynotes and invited speakers
Dr. Nazera Sadiq Wright is Associate Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2016), which won the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award for Outstanding Book of Literary Criticism. Her Digital Humanities project, DIGITAL GI(RL)S: Mapping Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century documents the cultural activities of black girls living in Philadelphia in the nineteenth century. In 2019, she was elected to the American Antiquarian Society. Fellowships through the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded archival research for her second book, Early African American Women Writers and Their Libraries.
Dr. Åsa Warnqvist is the Research Manager and Director of the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books. She is also affiliated with Linnaeus University. Warnqvist’s research has primarily been focused on Canadian writer L.M. Montgomery, the Swedish children’s book market, gender studies, and normativity studies. Her ongoing research is on depictions of fat characters in children’s and young adult literature, transgender narratives, and the impact of L.M. Montgomery on Swedish readers. Warnqvist is the editor of the Swedish academic journal Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research and a member of the editorial board of Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies. She is also a member of the IRSCL executive board (International Research Society for Children’s Literature), organizer of the IRSCL Congress 2019, and vice-president of IRSCL.
Mia Österlund, Docent, is Associated Professor in Comparative Literature at Åbo Akademi University, and principal investigator of the research project “Competing Temporalities: Chrononormativity in Postmillennial Finland Swedish Literature and Culture for Children and Young Adults 2019–22” at the Swedish Society for Literature in Finland. As a pioneer within Nordic girlhood studies, much of her research is centered on gender and children’s literature, for example fat studies and picturebooks. Österlund has published a book on crossdressing in young adult fiction and co-edited a range of studies such as Novel Districts: Critical Readings of Monika Fagerholm (2016) and published extensively. Her research interests are girlhood and gender studies, queer studies as well as picturebook and young adult fiction studies. She is co-editor of Barnboken: Journal of Children's Literature Research.
Hilda Jakobsson has a doctoral degree in literature since 2019 and presently works as a teacher in child and youth studies, Stockholm University. Her dissertation is about the Swedish author Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s early works, her depictions of girls becoming – or not becoming – women in encountering love and sexuality, as well as her relationship to the girls’ book genre. Jakobsson has published an article on the Swedish girls’ book series Kulla-Gulla and presented several papers on the subject of girls’ books. Furthermore, she has taught children’s and young adult literature. She is particularly interested in depictions of love and sexuality, queer and intersectional theory.
In her dissertation Pippi between Worlds and Word (2020), Lisa Källström describes the gaze as a form of techne discussing illustrations, sketches and cover images of Pippi Longstocking from German, French and Swedish Editions. Pippi is an interesting object of study because she has become something of a role model in gender equality. The concept of techne – as in the gaze as techne – stems from rhetorical theory. Techne is both art and craft, which modern languages tend to separate. On one hand, techne indicates something technical, strictly rule based, drill-based, and almost mechanical. On the other hand, it indicates something creative and expressive, for which there hardly exist any clear rules, and where skilful and mindful discretion is decisive. Techne gives us the possibility to stress the dynamic encounter of pictures and gaze as a creative act. To notice, to have a closer look, to shift perspective, and to question one‘s view is something people do; it is not simply a matter of receiving sensory data but of constructing meaning based on what we think we know about the world. Talking about what we see is a way to become aware of what we take for granted.
Birgitta Theander is PhD in literature since 2006. She is now affiliated researcher at Lund University. Her main interest is girls’ fiction from the early and middle twentieth century, on which subject she has written two books, Loved and Denied: Girls’ Fiction in Sweden 1945–65, and To the Work! Vocational Dreams and Working Life in Girls’ Fiction 1920–65. She has also presented Astrid Lindgren’s Katibooks on the net-based Litteraturbanken and contributed with several articles for The Swedish Biographic Encyclopaedia of Women.
Eva Söderberg is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Didactics at Dalarna University and has also been part of the interdisciplinary research projects “Challenging Gender” at Umeå University and “Normalization and the Neoliberal Welfare State” at Mid Sweden University, both in Sweden. One of her research focus is on children’s literature (girls’ fiction and picture books) and gender. In her dissertation (2004) she broadens the contextual space surrounding the classic girls’ story series about Kulla-Gulla by Sandwall-Bergström. Söderberg is also one of the pioneers in the interdisciplinary research network FlickForsk! Nordic Network for Girlhood Studies and has been active on its steering committee since its inception in 2008 until 2013.
Maria Nilson is a senior lecturer at Linnaeus University. In her research she focuses on popular literature and has written on popular romance, steampunk and YA dystopias among other subjects.
Malin Alkestrand, PhD, is currently an Assistant Professor in comparative literature at Linnæus University, Sweden. In her dissertation Magiska möjligheter: Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl och Cirkeln i skolans värdegrundsarbete [Magical possibilities: Teaching values in schools with Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl and the Circle] (2016) she explored how fantasy literature can be used to discuss and problematize democracy, human rights, and multiculturalism in a school context. She is currently working on a project about the relationship of power between adults and adolescents in Anglophone and Swedish YA dystopias.