Blog

This year’s colloquium on Charity, Humanitarianism, and Childhood at the University of Oxford’s Centre for the History of Childhood took a closer look at the tight knot that binds humanitarianism to the history of childhood.

Buse Demirkan is a PhD researcher in Human Geography at the University of Bristol, supervised by Dr Jennifer Crane and Professor Richard Harris. Her research examines how childhood giftedness is remembered in adulthood, utilising retrospective life story interviews to explore the emotional and spatial dimensions of the gifted label in England. She holds an MA in Inclusion and Disability from the University of Birmingham.

Hannah Stovin is a second year PhD student at Mansfield College, under the supervision of Prof. Christina de Bellaigue and Prof. Matt Cook. Her doctoral research is an examination of the social, cultural and medical understandings of the ‘queer child’ in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

Charlotte Canizo is a second-year DPhil student at St Hugh’s College, working on Unaccompanied Jewish Child Migrants in British and French Jewish Humanitarianism (1903-1948) under the co-supervision of Prof. Abigail Green and Dr. Jenny Carson.

Dr Heidi Kurvinen is a historian who has specialised in media and gender history and is based in University of Turku, Finland. In her current project, she is studying children’s involvement in social movements in Finland 1959–1989.

Amalie Olga Lyngsted is a PhD candidate at the SAXO-institute at the University of Copenhagen and the Danish National Archives. She is working on a PhD project examining the experience of children placed in care in early 20th century Denmark.

Julia Gustavsson is a DPhil candidate in the Faculty of History at St Peter’s College, Oxford, supervised by Prof Christina de Bellaigue and Dr Alex Aylward. Her doctoral research focuses on the historical practices of research on children in the UK through exploring the so-called child study movement which originated in the late nineteenth century.

Rachel O’Driscoll is a DPhil candidate in the Department for Continuing Education and at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. Her fields of interest include the history of disability, education, welfare and childhood in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain.

Ryan Aslett has just finished his second year studying Geography at the University of Exeter, Cornwall. He will spend the following year studying at Radboud University in the Netherlands. He is interested in how modern-day austerity has impacted young people's spatialities, social spheres and holistic development.

Shona Roberts is a recent University of Reading History and Politics Graduate, with a keen interest in the development of social and political movements.

Dr Laura Carter is an historian of modern Britain whose work focuses on histories of education, gender, and social change. Her first book, Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918-1979 (OUP, 2021) was nominated for the Royal Historical Society Whitfield Book Prize, 2022

İrem Yıldız is a DPhil candidate in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Her fields of interest include the history of disability, medicine, childhood studies, and museum studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Ottoman Empire and the Middle East.

Barnabas Balint is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Dr Zoe Waxman. His multi-lingual research (in English, French, and Hungarian) combines the history of childhood, gender, and identity, to explore Jewish responses to persecution.

Dr Pia Maria Jolliffe FRHistS is a Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. She teaches early modern and transnational Japanese history.

Jennifer Crane has held a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship to examine ‘the gifted child’ since 2019, and has published about this research in the Historical Journal and, forthcoming, in Contemporary European History.

Samantha Atwell is a DPhil Candidate in History at Magdalen College, Oxford. She is interested – broadly – in the histories of childhood, disability, education, gender, family, welfare and activism in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain.