Lectures

This lecture will focus on the transnational circulation of scientific knowledge across cultures by examining Anglophone and Chinese children’s literature published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to analyse how these texts mediated scientific knowledge and represented children’s relationship with science and the environment. How are complex abstract scientific ideas demystified, simplified, and “translated” for a child audience, both literally and figuratively? What rhetorical strategies are employed in children’s texts to help readers develop a scientific understanding of nature, impart environmental awareness, and foster a child reader’s sense of place? How are narrative techniques such as anthropomorphism and the dialogue format used to persuade readers to accept the values that are being imparted? The talk will investigate how children’s texts reveal the ambivalences and complexities of adults’ expectations about children’s roles within the natural world.

In the Global North, ideas of universalism and internationalism have been key to children’s literature studies and children’s texts and media (O’Sullivan 2017). Children’s literature, reading and childhood have been associated with the development of rational, tolerant individuals in enlightened democracies. In recent years, scholars have increasingly challenged the Eurocentric foundations of this perspective, both within children’s literature studies and in related fields (García González 2022, Murphy and Xu 2025). This lecture will use the concept agency/relational agency (Christensen 2025) to explore how notions of individuality and collectivity are represented in contemporary transnational children’s literature, as well as in international scholarship that employs the term. It asks to what extent transnational approaches can open new pathways in children’s literature studies, and which new questions and challenges emerge when the concept is applied.

The overseas dissemination and reception of Chinese children's literature significantly influence the target audience's understanding of Chinese culture, fostering future international exchanges. However, the overseas reception of Chinese children's literature faces many challenges. Through an investigation of overseas reviews of English translations of Chinese children's literature, we have identified significant "cognitive biases" probably stemming from Western readers' insufficient understanding of Chinese culture, history, and literary traditions. These biases manifest themselves specifically in three areas: inadequate recognition of poetic traditions, constraints of stereotypes, and misinterpretation of cultural context. To address these cognitive biases, translators of Chinese children's literature can employ strategies such as enhancing translations with annotations and prefaces by translators, promoting research on Chinese poetics, diversifying the selection of materials to showcase Chinese culture, achieving accurate translations, and strengthening collaboration between translators and original authors. These measures aim to deepen Western readers' comprehensive understanding of Chinese children's literature and its underlying culture, thereby fostering cross-cultural understanding and exchange and enhancing the influence of Chinese culture on the international stage.

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What is it like to spend your days translating stories about indignant insects, mischievous mice, troubled teens and the occasional talking tree? What motivates literary translators? Why choose children’s books? Why do we do what we do?

In this talk, I’ll share my own journey into translating children’s literature – the people and the places that shaped my path, and what my work looks like day to day.

Along the way, we’ll take a look at the mix of creativity, problem-solving and sheer joy that keeps translators and the stories they translate moving between languages, cultures and worlds of imagination. Expect anecdotes from the desktop, reflections on the challenges and delights of the job and a peek at what keeps the magic alive.

Finally, we’ll look ahead to the evolving landscape of the profession and consider how translators navigate a field that is always shifting, often surprising and full of possibilities for writers and readers, both young and old.

Many early children’s books for youth, especially those associated with the interconnected antislavery and pacifist movements, aim to initiate young people into a world of social connections and responsibility. Differing from reason-based ethics that supposedly produce universal standards for all, these texts are often grounded in a fundamental idea of relationality, emphasizing interdependence and openness to the needs of others. Yet, in history as now, prejudices and systems of oppression create obstacles when it comes to forming relationships of ethical obligation across cultures and borders or produce toxic forms of relation. Demonstrating the deep interrelationships between the historical antislavery and pacifist movements in the UK and the US, as well as these movements’ multi-layered attempts to create ethical youth through children’s literature, this presentation explores a tension that emerges in this body of literature between an ethics focused on immediate, insular relationships and one that embraces transnational relational obligations. Unpacking how underlying assumptions about childhood and the world impose comparatively expansive or limited versions of ethics, I contextualize the roles that this literature imagines for children within larger systems of international relation, while investigating how these compare with instances of historical children’s antislavery and peace activism.