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Kiera Vaclavik |
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Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative
Literature
Room: Arts One 1.38
Tel: +44 207 882 8333
Fax: +44 208 980 5400
Email: k.e.vaclavik@qmul.ac.uk
Areas of
specialisation
Anglophone and Francophone children's literature; comparative
literature; theories of intertextuality.
Current research
projects
Much of my research to date has been concerned with the evocation of
particular places in children’s literature. My first book, Uncharted Depths (2010), focused on
a specific form of journey narrative defined and made special by its
very particular destination. I was looking at katabasis or the descent to the
underworld in children’s literature in France and England. Well-known
texts like Jules Verne’s Journey to
the centre of the Earth and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
formed my principal corpus.
In my current research, representations of space are still central, but
are now taken in conjunction with the geographical positioning of the
child reader. My current project looks at children’s literature as a
form of ‘world literature’, exploring how readers in different
locations respond to the same texts and what it means to read a book
which isn't written specifically for you (but may be about you). It
also examines the implications of writing for a multi-locational
readership, exploring the ways in which authors conceive of their
audience(s) and the strategies they employ to cater for their various
needs. These issues will be explored via a series of case studies
examining texts produced in the colonial and postcolonial periods: in
addition to a number of European children's classics, I will examine
contemporary Caribbean children's literature in English and French.
Using a variety of sources, from letters and diaries to online blogs
and fan sites, the project aims to foreground the responses of children
from across the world to the texts in question.
Publications
Books
• Uncharted
Depths: Descent Narratives in
English & French Children’s Literature (Oxford: Legenda,
2010)
Journal articles
• ‘More than Mirrors: Dany
Laferrière and Frédéric Normandin’s Je suis fou de Vava’, Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies – Sites (January 2011) (Special Issue:
The Francophone Caribbean and North America, edited by Alec G.
Hargreaves and Martin Munro)
• ‘Goodbye, Ghetto: Further
Comparative Approaches to Children’s Literature’, PMLA, 126.1 (2011)
• ‘Visibilité variable: la
carte au trésor des Mines du roi Salomon’, Cahiers Robinson, 28
(2010) (Cartes et plans: paysages à construire, espaces à
rêver, ed. by Danielle Dubois-Marcoin and Eléonore
Hamaide-Jager), 19-28
• ‘Damaging Goods? Francophone
Children’s Books in a Postcolonial World, International Research in Children’s
Literature, 2.2 (December 2009) (Special Issue:
Internationalisation, Transculturalism and Globalisation:
Manifestations in Children’s Literature), 228-242
• ‘The descent to the underworld
retold and regendered in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass’, The Journal of
Children’s Literature Studies, 5:2 (July 2008) 37-56
• ‘Prioritizing children’s
writing: rewards, risks and repercussions’, Canadian Children’s
Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse, 34:1
(Spring 2008), 129-135
• ‘Jules Verne écrivain… de
jeunesse: The Case of Voyage au
centre de la terre’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 42
(2005), 276-83
• ‘George Sand & Jules Verne:
A Missing Link’, French Studies
Bulletin, 90 (Spring 2004)
• ‘‘Un Petit Costume de Mineur’:
Class and Gender Cross-Dressing in a Reworking of Germinal for Young Readers’, Romance Studies, 21 (2003), 115-126
• ‘Brief and Discontinuous Forms
of Prose as a Means of Empowerment in Stendhal’s La Duchesse de Palliano’, French Studies
Bulletin, 78 (Spring 2001), 2-6. [Winner of the R. H. Gapper Undergraduate Essay Prize
2000]
Book chapters
• ‘Haïti chérie:
Haïti pour qui?’, in Écrits
d’Haïti: Perspectives sur la littérature haïtienne
contemporaine (1986-2006), ed. by Nadève Ménard
(Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2011), pp. 137-47
• ‘Writing Young: Edwidge
Danticat’s Young Adult Fiction’, in Edwidge
Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, ed. by Martin Munro
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2010), pp.86-98
• ‘L’édition de jeunesse en
Haïti’, in L'Édition de jeunesse francophone face à
la mondialisation, ed. by Jean Foucault, Michel Manson and Luc Pinhas
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), pp. 137-148
• ‘The Truth in Lyra’s Lies’ in The Golden Compass and Philosophy: God
Bites the Dust, ed. by Richard Greene and Rachel Robison
(Chicago: Open Court, 2009), pp. 63-71
• ‘Undermining Body and Mind? The
Impact of the Underground in Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature’,
Histoires de la
Terre: Earth Sciences and French Culture, 1740-1940, ed. by
Louise Lyle and David McCallam (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2008), pp.
187-201
• ‘Des abîmes franchis? La
relation adulte-enfant dans Vendredi
ou la vie sauvage et les valeurs du texte pour son jeune
public’, in Devenir adulte et rester
enfant ? Relire les productions pour la jeunesse, ed. by
Isabelle Cani, Nelly Chabrol Gagne and Catherine d’Humières
(Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2008), pp.
283-294
• ‘Death
for Beginners: Nineteenth-Century Katabatic Narratives for Young
Readers’, in Birth and Death in
Nineteenth-Century French Culture,
ed. by Nigel Harkness, Lisa Downing, Sonya Stephens and Timothy Unwin
(Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 127-138
Doctoral supervision
I am currently supervising two doctoral projects: ‘British Modernist
Children’s Literature & its Translation into French’ and ‘Children,
Home and Empire, 1870-1950’. The latter is part of an AHRC-funded
project, ‘The Child in the World’ involving the joint supervision of
three PhDs by staff at Queen Mary and at the V&A Museum of
Childhood.
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