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Languages, Linguistics and Film

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Professor Kiera Vaclavik, BA, MA, PhD

Kiera

Director of the Centre for Childhood Cultures

Email: k.e.vaclavik@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 8333
Room Number: Arts One 139
Office Hours: Tuesdays 10-11am

Profile

Focusing on children’s literature and childhood culture from around 1850 to the present, my research explores questions including:

  • How do people engage with the material they encounter in books, and how does reading intersect with other aspects of their lives?
  • How and why are stories and literary works adapted into different media, and how do they circulate around the world?
  • What can ‘minor’ details tell us about the bigger picture? What light can easily-overlooked phenomena – of dress, of individual lives, of amateur performance – shed on broader historical patterns of global transmission?
  • In what ways are children creative and politically active? How are these aspects of lives related? And how can scholarly research and activity support, enable and extend children’s access to and involvement in the arts and cultural industries?

My work brings children’s literature studies into dialogue with a range of other fields including classics, postcolonial studies, fashion and music. It is guided by comparative approaches, engaging with Francophone and Anglophone material, and tracing the movement of works not only across linguistic and national borders but also between media and forms.

I have learnt an enormous amount through my collaborations with individuals and organisations across the creative and cultural industries, including Liberty, London, the V&A, Fevered Sleep, the London Symphony Orchestra and composer Paul Rissmann. Some of this work formed an Impact Case Study in REF2021: ‘Alice's Adventures in 21st-Century Creative Industries: Enrichment, Extension and Diversification of a Victorian Icon’ (3/4*).

My recent publications explore varied topics including the fancy dress component of World Book Day and the representation of museums in children’s literature. I have also been pursuing some of the many issues and materials uncovered in research for my latest book on Alice in Wonderland’s visual identity in the nineteenth century. These articles explore the sonic dimensions of the Alice books and the longstanding tradition of male performance of Carroll’s works.

Several recent and ongoing projects have focused on children’s well-being and – relatedly – on the rich creative and material lives of children, past, present and future. The BA-funded project, ‘Childhood heroes: storytelling survival strategies and role models of resilience to Covid-19’, with Rachel Bryant Davies (QMUL) and Lucie Glasheen (Southampton), and partners Storytime magazine, harnessed storytelling – past and present – to mitigate the immediate and longer-term educational, social and mental health impacts of COVID-19. I am looking forward to starting work on a Medical Research Council funded project with a team led by Andy Prendergast ‘’which also focuses on the benefits of creativity, play and storytelling.

In 2022 an AHRC network project with Hannah Field (Sussex), ‘Not Only Dressed but Dressing: Clothing, Childhood, Creativity’ brought together academics from multiple disciplines, curators and creative practitioners in workshops hosted by the V&A, Worthing Museum and the Musée du Textile et de la Mode (Cholet). Across these three workshops, clothing emerged as a rich and complex object of enquiry, with the potential to both limit and enable children’s identities and self-expression, as well as an exciting methodological resource and creative site.

Performance and creativity are also central to the AHRC-funded project, The Alice Sound, which is a collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and composer Paul Rissmann. The project produced a bespoke website offering free and permanent access to two new concert suites for young audiences based on Lewis Carroll's classic Alice books, plus a wide range of cross-curricular learning resources spanning art, writing, drama and music.

I have been part of the supervisory teams of seven successfully completed PhD projects addressing a wide range of aspects of children’s lives and forms of cultural production for young people. These include translations of modernist children’s literature in France, representations of punitive practices in Golden Age children’s literature, the place of the non-European world in the lives of British children, and child migration to East London. With colleagues in Drama, Film and Comparative Literature, I am currently working with seven further students on projects exploring, for example, illustrated works produced in Britain and Bengal, child clones in YA literature and co-creation as a form of political activism in the work of Fevered Sleep.

These students, joined by other PhD students and early career researchers from across QMUL with interests in children and childhood, meet fortnightly in the reading and discussion group of the Centre for Childhood Cultures, which I co-founded and direct. The Centre brings together researchers from across the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and beyond to foster research on children’s everyday lives and experiences, with a special focus on creativity, forms of literacy, and the links between different aspects of childhood culture.

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