The Emergent Adult
Adolescent Literature and Culture
3-5 September 2010
The Cambridge/Homerton Research and Teaching Centre for Children's Literature is hosting an international conference on 3-5 September 2010. The conference will focus on one of today's most dynamic social and literary phenomena. It will make connections between the recent research within neuroscience concerning the teenage cognitive, psychological, and emotional behaviour and the representation of adolescence in literature and media.
To ensure a genuine scholarly discourse, the format of the conference will be as follows,
- all papers will be circulated prior to the conference
- a number of discussants will be asked to read and respond to one or more papers
- at the sessions, presenters will have 5-10 minutes to focus on the main aspects of the paper, followed by the discussant's comments and general discussion
All papers will be considered for subsequent publication.
Keynote speakers:
Professor Shirley Brice Heath, Brown University, USA
Meg Rosoff, author, UK
Round table Chair: Jo-Anne Dillabough, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge
PROGRAMME
(Please note that the alphabetical order of papers within sessions does not reflect their actual order of presentation, which will be decided by the discussant)
For further inquiries please contact Maria Nikolajeva mn351@cam.ac.uk
Paper presenters
Ghada Al-Yaqout (University of Cambridge, UK) ‘Vampire Craze’: Beyond the confines of the textual saga
Bahiyah Dato’ Hj. Abdul Hamid (University Kebangsaan, Malaysia) Seeking friends and articulating selves: Understanding Malaysian male and female adolescent identities via the language of personal advertisements
Clémentine Beauvais (University of Cambridge,UK) The motif of the hybrid child in Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series
Anna Birketveit (University College Bergen, Norway) What is it about good girls and vampires?
Milena Blazic (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) Crossover texts: adults – children and children – adults
Madeleine Brens (University of Cambridge, UK) Female Young Offenders and the Impact of Arts Education
Nicole Brugger-Dethmers (Hollins University, USA) Cross-dressing for fun and performativity: The creation of identity through transgressive behaviour
Gabrielle Cliff Hodges (University of Cambridge, UK) ‘There was always time for books’: Readership within families
Karen Coats (Illinois State University, USA) ‘My Life Would Suck Without You’: Music in Young Adult Literature and Culture
Lucy Christopher (Bath Spa University, UK) A stolen sense of belonging: exploring an adolescent female relationship with an arid Australian landscape
Eduardo Encabo-Fernández (University of Murcia, Spain), Juan José Varela-Tembra (Instituto Teológico Compostelano, Spain), Isabel Jerez-Martínez (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) Enchanting young people: new fiction formats and texts. The case of the videogame “Dragon Ice” as crossroads in high fantasy
B J Epstein (University of East Anglia, UK) Dancing and playing and mattering: How gay teenagers are portrayed in Young Adult literature
Vanessa Harbour (University of Winchester, UK) Too risky – never! An exploration of contemporary British Young Adult fiction’s approach to risk taking behaviour
Roxanne Harde (University of Alberta, Canada) “Full citizenship”: The emerging woman in nineteenth-century America
Suzanna Henshon (Florida Gulf Coast University, USA) Popular culture for young people: A look at recent trends
Mary Hilton (University of Cambridge, UK) The other side of the abyss: representations of adolescence between the wars in Richmal Crompton's William Books
Pam Hirsch (University of Cambridge, UK), '"Female masculinity": the liberating effect of the athletic body for the adolescent girl, taking the film Girlfight as a test case.
Georgie Horrell (University of Cambridge, UK) Narratives of transgression and transition: apartheid stories post apartheid
Judith Inggs (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa) Conflicts and contradictions: fantasy and realism in Sello Duiker’s The Hidden Star
Rachel Johnson (University of Worcester, UK). Chemical warfare: An investigation into the engagement of young people with local issues through an examination of John Branfield’s novel Nancekuke
Jenn Jordan (University of Cambridge, UK) Identity and ideology: A critical look at theories of adolescent identity development
Louise Joy (University of Cambridge, UK) The knowledge gap: adolescent voicing in young adult fiction of the early nineteenth century
Lydia Kokkola (University of Turku, Finland) Monstrous bodies: Writing the incestuously abused adolescent body
Bettina Kummerling-Meibauer (University of Tubingen, Germany)
Elia Michelle Lafuente (independent scholar, Washington, DC) Struggle and identity in contemporary Caribbean-American coming-of-age fiction
Sonja Loidl (University of Vienna, Austria) ‘If the author is dead, who‘s updating her website?’ The writers’ part in popular culture for young adults
Morag Morrison (University of Cambridge, UK) Shouts and whispers: Learning to listen to the voices of disenchanted adolescent girls
Elpiniki Nikoloudaki-Souri (University of Crete, Greece) Representations of youth in the modern Greek novel: A study of Alki Zei’s novel Tina’s Web
Isabel Olid (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain) Female models in
chick-lit for young teenagers
Mia Österlund and Mia Franck (Åbo Akademi University, Finland) Growing up as a girl
Ming Cherng Duh (National Taitung University, Taiwan) Longing for love: Variants of adolescent’s romantic fantasy from Goethe to Proust
Debbie Pullinger (University of Cambridge, UK) A Young Inferno? Representations of adolescence in the work of three contemporary poets writing for older children
Stella Reinhard, (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA) E-volving “off the page”: How narratives for young readers are being influenced by emerging non-linear media and potentially changing the adolescent reader’s mind
Hege Emma Rimmereide (Bergen University College, Norway) The changing aesthetics in recent young adult’s literature
Christina Robison (University of New Hampshire, USA) Out-of-school literate practices
Jessica Sage (University of Reading, UK) Real sex in the covers of Doing It by Melvin Burgess
Erin Spring (University of Cambridge, UK) Title TBC
Garth Stahl (University of Cambridge, UK) Identity construction as a barrier to academic engagement
Kristina Stoilova Taneva (Plovdiv University, Bulgaria) Communicating in Internet – Motivating and Demotivating Factors Affecting the Writing and Reading of 12-13-year-old Bulgarian Schoolchildren
Jamie Tsai (National Taitung University, Taiwan) Eating practices and the emergent adults in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Texts and David Almond’s Skellig
Jean Webb (University of Worcester, UK) System to question to challenge: the fictional construction of adolescence in Kipling’s Kim, Chambers’ Dance on My Grave and Sonya Hartnett’s Sleeping Dogs
David Whitley (University of Cambridge, UK) Adolescence and the natural world in young adult fiction
Xu Xu (Pennsylvania State University, USA) The East meets the West: Representing footbinding and Chinese women in three adolescent novels
Vivian Yenika-Agbaw (Pennsylvania State University, USA) African youth in historical fiction: Representations of Kenyan boys and their ancestral land in adolescent literature