Clementine Beauvais

I joined the Department of Education in January 2016 as a Lecturer in English in Education. My research straddles the philosophy and cultural/ literary studies of childhood and education. I am particularly interested in theorisations of time and power in discourses about childhood. At York, I teach on the undergraduate course in English in Education, and supervise undergraduate and MA research projects.

Prior to this appointment, I was a Junior Research Fellowship in Education at Homerton College, Cambridge (UK), from 2013 to 2015. I hold a BA, MPhil and PhD in Education from Cambridge. I arrived in the UK in 2006, from my native country of France.

My earlier years of research were focused primarily on children’s literature: my doctoral thesis explored contemporary, politically committed children’s books, and an expanded version was published as The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature (John Benjamins, 2015). This monograph proposes an existentialist theorisation of adult-child relationships in children’s literature.

Currently, I am studying perceptions of child precocity in the 20th and 21st centuries, looking at a variety of discourses surrounding precocity, from literary to academic texts. My aim is to situate narratives of child precocity, both within contemporary concerns regarding time and economic pressures on education, and in continuity with more traditional forms of storytelling related to ‘child time’ and ability.

I very much like working on different types of projects and have published on such varied topics as the Mozart Effect, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, the ‘pushy parent’ label, Simone de Beauvoir... and the motif of the moon in Tintin.