Topic Announcement 2002
THE WORLDS OF CHILDREN, 1620-1920

Call for papers
The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (founded 1976) is pleased to announce the subject of its next annual conference, THE WORLDS OF CHILDREN, 1620-1920, to be held in June 2002.

The Seminar is accepting proposals for papers on all aspects of childhood in New England and contiguous portions of New York State and Canada, 1620 to 1920. The conference will focus on the broader areas of play, education, social behavior, work, and health. Categories might include sports and games, toys, doll play, and pet-keeping; children's sleeping arrangements and furniture; nursery lore; reading habits, common schooling and curriculum, the experience of female academies, and school-taught children's art. Other categories might encompass children's clothes and fashion, gender expectations, and issues of coming of age including sexual maturity and courtship; naming patterns and the use of nick-names; areas of juvenile congregation, children's spaces, perceptions of time, and language usage; and guardian and legal issues such as assignment to other households, adoption patterns, and the use of corporal punishment. The conference will also consider children in military companies, children experiencing religious conversions, juvenile mourning customs, and all aspects of child work, apprenticeship training, children's diseases, runaway children, and child abandonment and abuse. This year's Seminar will address children in both rural and urban settings, with an additional emphasis on children of servants and slaves, adopted children, immigrant children, as well as those growing up in orphanages and religious groups. Other approaches will also be encouraged. Preference will be given to proposals based on primary sources such as children's art, copybooks, period artifacts, formal and informal portraits, photographs, diaries, probate and genealogical records, reminiscences, school and town records, oral histories, and newspapers.

The twenty-seventh annual topic in the Seminar series, THE WORLDS OF CHILDREN, 1620-1920, will take place at Deerfield, Massachusetts, on a weekend of June 2001 to be announced. The program will consist of approximately seventeen lectures of twenty-five minutes each with related museum tours and demonstrations; selected papers from the conference will appear as the 2002 Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar to be issued approximately one year following the conference. The Seminar welcomes proposals from authors, academic and museum scholars, curators, teachers, collectors, and the general public.

[ ] To request further information regarding this conference, please check here and return this form to dublsem@bu.edu.

[ ] To submit a paper proposal for this conference, please check here and return this form together with a one-page description and a one-page vita or biography by 1 February 2002. Email proposals sent as attachments are encouraged. (Please follow-up with printout).

Dublin Seminar Annual Membership
[ ] Members receive topic, conference, and publication announcements; a copy of the current Annual Proceedings; pre-conference abstracts and bibliographies; 10 percent discount on conference fees; and 10 percent discount on all Seminar publications sold at the conference. $30.

Past seminar topics and a current list of publications for sale may be consulted at http:www.bu.edu/dublinseminar. A printed topic announcement will follow in the mail.