Dr Madeleine Wood

Biography

I am a Lecturer in Childhood Studies at the University of Essex, based in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies. I joined Essex in 2023. I am an interdisciplinary researcher in childhood studies, literature, and psychoanalysis, and have worked extensively on trauma. I was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for my MA and PhD at the University of Warwick. I am interested in interdisciplinary approaches which can bridge the social sciences and humanities. In my own work, I explore the representation of children and the production of childhood. I have an ongoing interest in the early history of psychoanalysis and French psychoanalysis, particularly the theoretical contributions of Jean Laplanche. My first book, Parents and Children in the Mid-Victorian Novel: Traumatic Encounters and the Formation of Family, was published in 2020. Here I create an original argument about the history of trauma. 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 Sigmund Freud's early writings and Jean 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 theory. My book expands this, taking in the history of science, Romanticism, Victorian literature and culture, and trauma theory. Between 2013-2016, I held lectureships in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Kings College London and Queen Mary University of London. Building on my perennial interest in the clinical and therapeutic, I trained to be a social worker in 2017. Before coming to the University of Essex, I was the Clinical Service Lead in a specialist therapeutic service supporting children in care and adopted children. I remain involved in social work training and learning events. My current major research project is childhood vision, testimony, and bearing witness. Here I mediate between my academic and clinical work, thinking about the way in which creativity can provoke, interrupt, or disrupt medico-legal constructions of childhood. I am interested in the positioning of children in legal and clinical spaces, and how this relates to the representation of children in literature, psychoanalysis, and other forms of cultural production. 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. • Childhood and trauma. • Creativity, trauma and recovery. • The history of psychoanalysis, and the positioning of childhood within this history. • Childhood and children in literature, film, and art. • Childhood in the long nineteenth century. • Children in clinical and legal spaces, including social work practice. • 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)

• 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)

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)