Bios

Dr. Allison Giffen is a professor in the English department at Western Washington University where she teaches classes in nineteenth-century US literature with an emphasis on women writers, childhood studies, disability studies, and popular literature. Her current research explores the intersections of race, disability, and childhood in late nineteenth-century periodicals. She recently co-edited Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Routledge). Her work has appeared in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Women’s Studies, and American Transcendental Quarterly. She also has essays in Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: National and Transatlantic Contexts (Routledge) and The Teacher’s Body: Embodiment, Authority and Identity in the Academy (SUNY).
https://chss.wwu.edu/english/english-faculty-allison-giffen

Dr. Lucia Hodgson is an independent (unaffiliated) scholar who researches and publishes in nineteenth-century United States literature and culture with a focus on representations of childhood and slavery. She earned a BA from Yale University, an MA in American Literature from Claremont Graduate University, and a PhD in English from the University of Southern California. She has taught at the University of Southern California, California Institute of the Arts, California State University, Northridge, and most recently as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University for nine years, where she founded and convened a Critical Childhood Studies working group funded by the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. She works as Dean’s Special Initiatives Project Coordinator in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Hodgson is the author of two books: Raised in Captivity: Why Does America Fail Its Children? (Graywolf Press) and “Age of Consent: Slavery, Seduction, and American Girlhood” (under advance contract with SUNY Press). Her essays have appeared in Early American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, Journal of Juvenilia Studies, and The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the New Humanities (University of Georgia Press). Prior to her career in academia she worked in public policy at the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University, the Harvard Project on Schooling and Children, and the Los Angeles Roundtable for Children housed in the Sociology Department at the University of Southern California, during which time she wrote Raised in Captivity: Why Does America Fail Its Children? (Graywolf Press).
https://drluciakhodgson.org/