June 13, 2015

The Society for the History of Children and Youth Conference will be held June 24-26, 2015, at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC.  Check out the following  panels which include papers focused on the history of black girls and girlhood:

Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Black Girlhoods and Cultures of Sexuality: Race, Age and Gendered Expectations

12:00-1:30 Session A
Chair: Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown University

1. “Jazzing with Boys and the Other Secrets of Great Migration Youth” Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown University
2. “A well-talked-about affair: Black Debutantes and the Cotillion in the Washington Afro- American” Miya Carey, Rutgers University
3. “Black Girlhood and Adolescent Sexual Culture in the Postwar U.S.” Amanda H. Littauer, Northern Illinois University
4. “Racing Gender, Racing Age: Negating Discourses and Ageless Black Girl/Women in the 19th Century” Tammy Cherelle Owens, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Literature Reflects Childhood/Childhood Reflects Literature
Chair: Laura Lovett, University of Massachusetts

1. “ ‘A lullaby too rough’: Losing Children at Home and Abroad in The Winter’s Tale”
2. Anna-Claire Simpson, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
3. “A Slave Autobiography Reshaped for Antebellum African American Children: African Free School” Valentina Tikoff, Loyola University Chicago
4. “Perceptions of Gender Nonconformity: An Examination of the Relational Triad of Child and Adult Response to a Classic Children’s Picture Book” Sharon McQueen, Old Dominion University
5. “Caribbean Stepsisters: Cinderella, Circulation, and the Intimate Negotiation of Race within Transatlantic Families” Courtney Weikle-Mills, University of Pittsburgh

Inside and Outside the Institution: Shaping Identities, Relationships, and Spaces
Chair: Jim Marten, Marquette University

1. “The Social World of St. Louis Child Refugees, Orphans, and Contrabands during the Civil War” William McGovern, University of California-San Diego
2. “Performing Respectability: Orphans and the Public Gaze in 19th and 20th Century Ontario” Tara Brookfield, Wilfrid Laurier University
3. “Institutionalization vs. Incarceration: Relationships Formed at the Wisconsin School for Girls, 1941-1958” Charissa Keup, California State University-Long Beach
4. “Relationships in Residential Child Care: History, Theory and Practice,” Andrew Kendrick, University of Strathclyde

2:00-3:30 Session B
Round Table Discussion: Recent Innovations and Future Directions in the History of Black Girlhood
Chair: Corinne T. Field, University of Virginia

Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown University
 | LaKisha Michelle Simmons, University of Buffalo, SUNY | Rhian Keyse, University of Exeter
 | Tammy Cherelle Owens, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Thursday, June 25

8:30-10:00 Session C

New Women and Modern Girls: Edges of Race, Gender, and Generational Belonging in the US, 1870-1933
Chair: Melissa R. Klapper, Rowan University

1. “Youth, Racial Segregation, and Generational Belonging: Creating Rituals of Generational Succession in White and Black U.S. Woman Suffrage Organizations,
2. 1870-1900” Corinne T. Field, University of Virginia
“ ‘Normal’ Tomboys: Regendering Tomboys at the Turn of the Century” Renee Sentilles,Case Western Reserve University
3. “New Negro Childhood: Jessie Redmond Fauset’s Representations of Modern Girls” LaKisha Michelle Simmons, University of Buffalo, SUNY

Creating Print Communities: Youth and Belonging Through Periodicals in Britain, South Africa and the United States
Chair: Paul Ringel, High Point University


1. “Round the Evening Lamp: Models of Community in Post-Civil War American
2. Children’s Magazines, 1865-1880” Paul Ringel, High Point University
““The Cool Four Million”: Imagining Youth in 1960s Britain” Helena Mills, University College
3. “Bringing ‘honour to [their] people’: Children and the Reinvention of South Africa’s Coloured Community through the APO newspaper, 1909-1914” Patricia van der Spuy, Castleton College

10:30-12:00 Session D

Market Relations: The Commodification of the Child
Chair: Nell Musgrove, Australian Catholic University

1. “What Price a Child? Commodification and Australian Adoption Practice 1850-1950”
2. Shurlee Swain, Australian Catholic University
3. “African American Children and Placing Out: Examining Race in Home Finding” Megan Birk, University of Texas Pan American
4. “Advertising Suitable Parent: Assessments and Presentations of Adoption Applicants for Intercountry Adoption” Judith Lind, Linköping University & Cecilia Lindgren, Linköping University
5. “The Wild West and the Commodification of Indian Childhood” Martin Woodside, Rutgers University-Camden

4:00-5:30 Session F

Love, Sex, and Coming of Age in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Africa

“Inventing South African Sexualities: Sex Education, Race, and Youth in the Early Twentieth Century” Sarah Emily Duff, University of Witwatersrand

“From Instruction to Indecent Assault: The Criminalization of Childhood Sexual Play in Colonial East Africa” Corrie Decker, University of California-Davis

“Towards a Global Anatomy of Sexual Development: Race, Class and Imperial Circulations in Medical and Public Discourses on Girls’ Puberty in Belgium and Belgian Congo (1890-1960)” Laura Di Spurio, Free University of Brussels & Amandine Lauro, Free University of Brussels

“Youth, Sexuality and Nightlife in Bamako, Mali (1950s-1970s)” Marie Rodet, University of London

More Than Child’s Play: Youth Activism in the 1960s United States South

Chair: Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown University

“Preschool Politics: Head Start and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi” Crystal Sanders, Pennsylvania State University

“ ‘Not Old Enough to Know All of It:’ The Business of Childhood and the 1963 Children’s Crusade” Susan Eckelmann, University of Tennesee-Chattanooga

“ ‘Black Power Boys’: Black Youth Activism, The Invaders, and the Black Power” Shirletta J. Kinchen, University of Louisville

Friday, June 26

8:30-10:00 Session G

Youth and Social Change: belonging, being and becoming in Africa

Chair: Elizabeth Cooper, Simon Fraser University

“From Belonging To ‘Being’ And ‘Becoming’ In Rwanda: Transitioning to Adulthood in the Midst of Systemic Change (1930-1962)” Kirsten Pontalti, University of Oxford

“Relationality and the Impact of Shifting Caregiving Structures on Youth’s Experience of Suffering: The Case of Youth Who Head Households in Kenya” Laura Lee, University of Oxford

“ ‘The Land Grows People’: Youth and Belonging in Rural Northern Uganda” Lara Rosenoff Gavin, University of British Columbia

Contested Care of Babies

Chair: Mary Clare Martin, University of Greenwich
“Lonely Infants? Germs, Breast-Milk and Maternal Care in Interpreting ‘Hospitalism’,

1897-1945” Katharina Rowold, Roehampton University

“The ‘Brown Babies’ of the 2nd World War: the mixed race offspring of black GIs and white British women” Lucy Bland, Anglia Ruskin University

“A Genealogy of Rupture: Struggles and Spatial Relations in the Making of Transnational Adoptees, from Minnesota to South Korea” Stevie Larson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“‘Baby Farming Days Are Not Over’: Baby-Farming in Britain, 1920-1967” Daniel Grey, Plymouth University

2:00-3:30 Session I

“Home” Children: Exploring Relationships in Institutions for Children

Chair: Megan Birk, University of Texas Pan American
“Writing ‘Home’: Indentured Children’s Letters to the Colored Orphan Asylum” Sarah

Mulhall Adelman, Framingham State University

“‘You have been my best friend’: Reading the Student-Teacher Relationship in the Letters of Ragged School Emigrants Between 1850-1870” Laura M. Mair, University of Edinburgh

“Glimpses of Family: What Do the Records Tell Us about the Families of Children in Care?” Sharron Lane, Australian Catholic University

“Grown Up Children of the Orphanage: Lasting Relationships in the Washington City Orphan Asylum” Jamalin Harp, Texas Christian University

4:00-5:30 Session J

Captive Childhoods: Citizenshp, Gender and Labor in the Atlantic World

Chair: Elizabeth Kuznesof, University of Kansas

“‘Every house needs One’: Apprenticeship and Child Labour in Industrial Schools in Colonial Jamaica, 1900-1938” Shani Roper, Smith College

“Between Apprentice and Bondsman: West African “Re-Captive” Children and Nineteenth-Century Missions” Benjamin N. Lawrance, Rochester Institute of Technology

“The Other Un-Free Children in Early America: Pauper Apprenticeship and Gradual Emancipation” Ruth Wallis Herndon, Bowling Green State University

---