The SELCIE team have been busy since the exhibition opened at the start of June 2018. And, though we’ve not been to the archives very often recently, we have been out and about, sharing the findings of SELCIE.
On June 29th, Lyn, Danielle, and Morgan visited Magdalen College, Oxford University, to take part in the Children’s Traces one-day colloquium. The papers explored how children are made visible through the archive; through their diaries, letters, drawings and objects they owned, just like the Growing Up with Books exhibition exemplifies. Here are some photos from the glorious day:
Though she did not travel quite so far, another member of the SELCIE team, Lois Burke, also recently ventured south to attend the Sixth International Literary Juvenilia Conference at Durham University from the 5th – 8th July 2018. Lois assisted in organising the conference titled: Minority Voices: Writing by children and adolescents from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, which excitingly saw the launch of the new Journal of Juvenilia Studies.
The photograph below, taken by Lois at the event, shows a facsimile of Charlotte Brontë’s satirical play The Poetaster, in which Brontë appropriates the male literary tradition: “published by no one, possessed by everyone”.
Back at home in Edinburgh, the Growing Up with Books exhibition continues to be visited by the public and many tourists from all over the world – it is brilliant that these books are able to be enjoyed by so many. Creating an extra buzz in the gallery are workshops in relation to the books on display, held by artists and storytellers. More information on these can be found here: https://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/whats-on.
Artist-in-Residence for SELCIE, Katie Forrester, ran two workshops – one making rubber-stamped books and one making beastie bookmarks! Here are some of the images of the action:
Still to come this summer are interviews of visitors to the exhibition – we hope to capture memories of some of the books on display to create an oral archive. This will form part of the legacy of the collaboration between the Museum of Childhood and SELCIE, for future researchers and children’s literature enthusiasts.
The SELCIE team will also be at the Edinburgh Book Festival; the slot is on the August 15th from 15:45 to 16:45 in Charlotte Square Gardens. For more information, please follow this link: https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/sarah-dunnigan-lyn-stevens
The SELCIE team hope you are enjoying this gorgeous sunshine and you are having a great summer so far! We hope to see you out and about at the exhibition or the book festival!
This post written by Katie Forrester
