Professors Laurence Brockliss and George Rousseau are offering a five-year series on the history of childhood that commenced in Michaelmas Term 2003. Ordinarily there will be eight meetings per term on Thursday afternoons at 5pm. In Michaelmas Term 2007, the programme will take place in the Summer Common Room, Magdalen College, Oxford. The annual topics for study are these:
2003: children and violence
2004: adult-child relations
2005: children and health
2006: children and consumption
2007: children and citizenry
The list of Centre speakers and topics is posted each year in the Oxford Gazette, as are the workshops and lectures.
The Centre coordinates its series and programmes for the History of Childhood. The History Faculty established this Centre in 2003. This is the first Centre for the History of Childhood in the United Kingdom, and it is hoped that its creation will help to foster interest in this burgeoning area of historical research within and without the University. The Centre exists both to promote research into the history of childhood and to encourage links between historians and childcare professionals and representatives in the belief that close association between the two will be of mutual benefit. Its directors in the first instance are Professors Laurence Brockliss and George Rousseau, whose biographies are given on a link to this page (see links). They are assisted on the one hand by an internal committee of Faculty postholders interested in the history of childhood (see below) and on the other by a broadly based external committee of childcare professionals from different backgrounds.
The original external committee included:
Commander David Armond (New Scotland Yard)
Professor Albert Aynsley-Green (National Clinical Director for Health, Department of Health)
Stephen Cretney ( All Souls College, Oxford)
Diane Lees (Director of the Museum of the History of Childhood, Bethnal Green)
The late Allan Levy QC
Professor Kate Retford ( Birkbeck College, London)
Dr Peter Sullivan (Department of Pediatrics, University of Oxford)
Sir Keith Thomas (All Souls College, Oxford)
Professor John T. Truman M.D. (Chief of Columbia Physicians and Surgeons, New York)
In the immediate future the Centre’s main role is to provide an institutional focus for the five-year seminar programme on the history of childhood, which began in Michaelmas 2003 and mount an annual cross-disciplinary colloquium on a particular theme. In the longer term, it is intended that the Centre should contribute a course on the history of childhood to the University’s master’s programmes and promote doctoral study. With this intention, the directors with the help of members of the external committee are exploring ways of seeking outside funding to give the Centre the necessary financial security.
The first History of Childhood Colloquium took place in June 2004, with subsequent Colloquiua beting held in June 2005 and June 2006.
The Workshop aimed to offer a badly needed historical dimension to the contemporary approach to children. At present, the history of childhood has only just begun to be compiled and written. Philippe Ariès’ landmark study of the 1960s, translated into English in 1973 as Centuries of Childhood, almost seems quaint and complacent today, but still remains the most significant overview. Children appear differently now than they did in the 1960s, as virtually every aspect of life in the world has changed many times since then. Ariès surveyed the gamut of childhood, finding it to be a largely happy age, perhaps reflecting postwar triumphal optimism. He described cross-overs from childhood to adulthood now taken for granted: how children were constructed in the eighteenth century and later rediscovered and transformed in the world of Thackeray and Dickens. Ariès even catalogued some harsh treatment children received. But he could not then have foreseen, when compiling his evidence and writing it up, how drastically this sunny picture would change. By the turn of the new century, no one anywhere can claim that the general lot of children is rosy.
Our emphasis in the Workshop programmes is on aspects of childhood that particularly command media attention today. While we are historians ourselves and adopt historical approaches in much of the work we do, we think the subject merits a different approach from the conventionally historical one divided into linear periods and geographical areas. The intensive modern debate about the child cries out to be placed in a comparative and historical perspective. This emphasis has its dangers since it seems impossible to discuss any aspect of modern childhood without becoming mired in political controversy. We acknowledge the controversial nature of the subject, but believe that an historical approach to contemporary problems of all kinds is nevertheless an important, although usually neglected, way to understand and address them.
The Workshop is an interdisciplinary activity. While we expect historians of different types to form the main constituency, we also hope to engage diverse scholars from the arts and sciences, the humanities and social sciences, and especially draw from medicine and the history of medicine. Our selected speakers reflect this interdisciplinarity and will not be limited at any time in the first five-year series to historians. The list each year includes a broad range of historical scholars from different disciplines, as well as members of the public sphere and civil sector: those outside academia who work with children, teach children, care for children, minister to children, prescribe for children, and represent children in public.
The first five years (2003–7) also constitutes a seeding period toward funding the establishment of our interdisciplinary Centre for the History of Childhood in Oxford, the first in the United Kingdom. Towards reaching this goal we have assembled an internal organizing and external consultative committee. The former is the small group of local scholars who will steer the Workshop through its first five years. The larger consultative committee includes, in addition to historians, non-professional academics both within and without Oxford who work in areas integral to contemporary childhood, and who will assist the co-organizers to reach the general public once the Centre is established. The current members of the internal organizing committee are below:
Organizing Committee:
Laurence Brockliss (Magdalen)
George Rousseau (Oxford University)
Ruth Harris (New)
Olwen Hufton (Emeritus, Merton)
Janet Howarth (St Hilda's)
Lyndal Roper (Balliol)
Nick Stargardt (Magdalen)
Contact details for further information about the Workshop and its programmes and the Centre for the History of Childhood:
General Enquiries:
Telephone: 44 (0)1865 277254
Fax: 44 (0)1865 250704
To contact the Directors:
laurence.brockliss@magdalen.oxford.ac.uk
george.rousseau@magdalen.oxford.ac.uk
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