Gesar is a warrior-like king in the realm of Ling and the protagonist of a voluminous folkloric poem that many Tibetan bards have performed for centuries. With Gesar’s increasing fame in modern times, the orature has become a quintessential representation of Tibetan culture. By comparing two children’s books that draw on the Gesar tradition, Tibetan Heroic Epic: Gesar Children’s Literature Collection and Gesar Epic: Hor-Ling Battle, Zhuoga will discuss the meaning and relevance of cultural ...

Join our Research Group! Open to Undergraduates! Are you interested in: - children’s media, literature and culture historical childhoods - children’s rights - education - child pyschology - sociology of childhood - or anything else child-related? The Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group welcomes students from any department with an interest in Childhood Studies to attend our Open House! Join us for more information on programming, research opportunities, mentorship, participation in an annual Undergraduate Research ...

This talk by Martina Mattei will explore key concepts from The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture, focusing on Chapter 27 ("Translation") and Chapter 29 ("Adaptation"). It will address how children's literature is translated and adapted across different cultures and media, examining the balance between staying true to original texts and making them accessible for young readers. The chapter on translation covers the complexities of translating children's literature, emphasizing the need to preserve cultural ...

As part of a new lecture series, "Children's Literature, Cultural Preservation, and Language Revitalization," the Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group invites you to a talk by Indigenous author Kseniia Bolshakova (Dolgan) entitled "Matchstick for Survival: Indigenous Writing in the Russian Arctic." Indigenous author Kseniia Bolshakova will give a talk on her decolonial book The Frost Also Melts. The novel explores the fate of Arctic Indigenous nomads through the personal story of a child raised ...

In this talk, Dr. Jawa Jha focuses on child labor, particularly the issues faced by the girl child as depicted in the TV cartoon series Meena Ki Kahani (Stories of Meena), broadcast in India. This presentation is divided broadly into three main sections. The first section provides a brief overview of India’s children literature, tracing its transition from oral storytelling traditions to visual media like cartoon-based TV shows. The second section examines child labor issues ...

As part of a new lecture series, Children’s Literature, Cultural Preservation, and Language Revitalization, the Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group invites you to a talk by Prof. Nicola Daly entitled "Dual Language Picturebooks in Aotearoa: Contributions to Language Revitalisation and Critical Language Awareness." In this talk, Prof. Nicola Daly will traverse a range of research studies exploring the contribution of dual language picturebooks to language revitalisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on her new ...

The cardboard box has long been regarded as the imaginative plaything par excellence. In 2005, the box was inducted into the Toy Association’s Toy Industry Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY—institutionalizing a decades-old association between cardboard and children’s creative play. On the page and onscreen, in museum galleries, schools, toy aisles, and at home, today cardboard occupies a privileged position within children’s material culture where the promises of ...

How might Indigenous scholars theorize with stories from our childhoods while enacting the Indigenous critical theory and praxis of refusal? This talk engages the Inupiaq haunting story of the Berry People along with North American histories of Indigenous family separation to examine Catholic political theologies of children. In doing so, it illustrates the ongoing necessity of Indigenous political savviness in defending communities and nations from the haunted whistlings of Christian religious institutions for Indigenous children ...

Literature, and children’s literature specifically, helps instill value and humanity in times of crisis, as portrayed in Jude Idada’s Boom Boom. Both adults and children find it challenging to handle chronic diseases, such as sickle cell, HIV/AIDS, and viral hepatitis B. Focusing on one of these lethal diseases, sickle cell anemia, this study argues that, even with great innovations in medical science, society is the main killer and not the disease itself. Since disease forms ...

Historical Memory in Narrative is the third annual undergraduate research showcase sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group. It features multidisciplinary presentations of undergraduate research related to childhood, including senior honors thesis research in Comparative Literature by senior major Isabella Williams and research on Writing and Literature by Tia Trinh in the College of Creative Studies. The panel of presentations and subsequent discussion on the theme Historical Memory in Narrative ...

This talk explores how modern adaptations of Dante’s Divine Comedy for young readers reshape the poem’s theology of violence. In Inferno, punishment reflects divine justice and the consequences of disordered love; in contemporary picturebooks, illustrated editions, and comics, this moral framework is often softened, secularized, or inverted. Through examples from Italy, the United States, and Japan, the talk shows how artists translate Dante’s violence into abstraction, irony, or spectacle, transforming divine retribution into aesthetic or ...

The Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group invites you to a talk by Dr. Yasmine Motawy. In this talk, Motawy will examine the Egyptian child reader as a historically produced subject shaped by two decades of neoliberal transformation. Drawing on her new book, Children’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society, which examines a new wave of Egyptian picturebooks published in Egypt since the early 2000s, she will trace the historical development of Egyptian children’s literature ...

Are you interested in: – children’s media, literature, and culture – historical childhoods – children’s rights – education – child pyschology – sociology of childhood The Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group welcomes graduate and undergraduate students from any department with an interest in Childhood Studies to attend our Open House! Free food and drinks provided. Learn about our on-campus Childhood Studies community (courses, affiliated faculty, and graduate students), research and conference opportunities offered by ...

This trilingual reading of writings by Indigenous writer Kseniia Bolshakova will include portions from her autobiographical novel All the Frost Melts, which was recently translated into English after being published in Dolgan and Russian in 2024. It will feature writer Kseniia Bolshakova reading in Dolgan, linguist Karina Sheifer (UC Santa Barbara) reading in Russian, and translator Ainsley Morse (UC San Diego) reading in English. The reading also will include imagery from life in the Russian ...

The symbol of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in public memory in Russia and abroad has been the tragedy of the Romanovs’ family in which five children of Nicholas II and Alexandra had been executed by the Bolsheviks, along with their parents. What is less salient in public commemoration is the fact that thousands of ordinary children died in the years after the Revolution from hunger, diseases, and overall neglect as direct causes of the turbulent ...

This undergraduate showcase will feature a research presentation by Fiona Boborci, titled “Translating Childhood: Untranslatability, Linguistic Hospitality, and Reader Perception in The Little Prince.” In her talk, Fiona explores the linguistic, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of translation in children’s literature, examining how different English translations of Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince produce distinct understandings of childhood, imagination, and moral responsibility. Drawing on both French and English traditions, the presentation highlights translation as an active and transformative ...