Marah Gubar is an interdisciplinary childhood studies scholar who found her academic footing as a specialist in children’s literature and popular theater. A through-line that connects her past and present work is her appreciative recognition of how artists working in various media have paved the way for theorists of childhood by generating nuanced accounts of youth agency that acknowledge without essentializing age-related asymmetries of ability, experience, and power. Building on their work, her scholarship addresses philosophical questions of what it means to be a child; what children’s literature is and how to teach it; why elaborating a positive vision of the concept of innocence might be of value; and whether a critically ambivalent form of paternalism might sometimes be justified.
Author of
Artful Dodgers (OUP 2009) and many essays, Gubar is currently completing a book entitled
How to Think About Children: Childhood Studies in the Academy and Beyond. In it, she test drives a simple, open-ended philosophical framework for thinking about childhood articulated in earlier articles, distinguishing between deficit, difference, and kinship models of what it means to be a child. Her goal is to show how this short, amendable list of models could function as a shared language, enabling researchers who work on children and childhood across the arts, sciences, and humanities to communicate their key insights not only with each other, but with people outside of academia. In the process, she offers a revisionary history of how the interdisciplinary field of “child study” came into being, one that celebrates the artful contributions of oddball figures who have been neglected for the ironic reason that no single discipline cares to claim them.
