This panel investigates the centrality of childhood to the rapidly changing medical and scientific landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an era that saw the development of Darwin’s theories of evolution, the rise of wide-spread support within the scientific community for eugenics, and the medicalization of birth, of neurodivergence, and of gender and sex. Papers will interrogate how various scientific/medical discourses used actual children as subjects, and how these discourses relied on the imagined figure of the child to bolster scientific claims around “naturalness,” plasticity, race, and gender, and to justify invasive medical practices performed on both children and adults.

Call for seminar presentation proposals at the 16th ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) conference (Mainz, Germany, 29 August-2 September 2022)