Dr Madeleine Wood

Biography

I am a lecturer in Childhood Studies based in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies and the Course Director for BA Childhood Studies. I am a registered social worker and trained as a systemic practitioner at the Institute for Family Therapy. Before joining Essex in 2023, I was the clinical service lead in a CAMHS service for children in care and adopted children. Earlier I worked in a specialist service to support children and young people who had been affected by sexual abuse. My background is multi-disciplinary: between 2013-2016, I held lectureships in nineteenth-century literature at King's College London and Queen Mary University of London. My approach to childhood studies therefore seeks to create new dialogues between cultural production and clinical theory and practice, focused on the adversity which children experience and the socio-political and economic contexts in which adversity occurs. My research is transdisciplinary, traversing childhood studies, the medical humanities, literature and psychoanalysis, concerned with the representation of children and the medico-legal production of childhood. Freud's early writings and the theoretical contributions of French psychoanalyst, Jean Laplanche, are important touchstones. I am interested in the ethics of intersubjectivity via Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler, amongst others. I am currently working on two strands of research. The first is a major interdisciplinary project: The Child as Witness: Story-telling, Diagnosis and Regulation. This research focuses upon the construction of childhood, the representation of children, and the formation of medico-legal frameworks. This research aims to examine how post-industrial childhood, from the nineteenth-century through to the present, has been (re)constituted through the positioning of the child as witness to a harmful adult world. In the twenty-first century, children experience suffering and death through genocide, war, and involuntary displacement. The project conceptualises the production of childhood within conditions of actual, structural and representational violence. My article, 'Nineteenth-century narratives of addiction: relational harm and the child as witness' (2024) forms part of this project. Here I produce an original historical argument: through close reading of medical and cultural texts, I demonstrate how the narrativization of relational harm underpinned the emerging categorisation of ‘addiction’, the child occupying a privileged position in these narratives. My second research thread examines culture, embodiment and fantasy, with a particular focus on the idea of the ‘grown-up’ adult 'child'. My new article High-School Stories and Semiotic Bodies: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) in the Cultural Field, responds to this (forthcoming). My first monograph, Parents and Children in the Mid-Victorian Novel: Traumatic Encounters and the Formation of Family, was published in 2020. In the book, I study trauma in a dual time frame: the mid-Victorian period and the later development of psychoanalysis. I argue that the mid-Victorian novel anticipates psychoanalytic concepts of trauma, pushing beyond the parameters of the contemporary medical models. Mid-Victorian novels present their protagonists in a state of damage, provoked and defined by the conditions of the mid-century family. The cross-generational relationship is represented as formative and traumatising. I create new readings of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Examining a series of theoretical texts, I show that psychoanalysis shares the mid-Victorian concern with the unequal relationship between adult and child, orientating myself through Freud's early writings and Laplanche's 'general theory of seduction'. I have published articles and chapters on Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Brontë, Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis, comparative literature, and gender. My book expands this, taking in the history of science, Romanticism, Victorian literature and culture, and trauma studies. I was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for my MA and PhD at the University of Warwick. I would love to hear from prospective PhD students in any area of childhood studies. I have a particular interest in the following: • Childhood and children in psychoanalytic theory and the history of psychoanalysis. • Childhood and trauma. • Creativity, trauma and recovery. • Childhood and children in literature, film, and art. • Children’s literature. • Childhood in the long nineteenth century. • Children in clinical and legal spaces, including social work practice. • Children in care and adopted children. • Interdisciplinary approaches, working between the social sciences and humanities.

Qualifications

• PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick, (2009)

• MA in English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick, (2005)

• BA in English Literature University of Sussex, (2003)

• Intermediate Certificate in Systemic Child-Focused Practice Institute of Family Therapy, (2023)

• MSc Advanced Social Work Practice University of Bedfordshire, (2020)

• Postgraduate Diploma in Social Work University of Bedfordshire, (2018)

Appointments

University of Essex

• Lecturer in Childhood Studies, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex (1/11/2023 - present)

• Course Director: BA Childhood Studies, University of Essex (2/9/2024 - present)

Other academic

• Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London (1/9/2014 - 31/8/2016)

• Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Department of English, Kings College London (2/9/2013 - 30/6/2014)

• Teaching Fellow in Romanticism and Nineteenth-Century Literature, Brunel University London (3/9/2012 - 31/8/2013)