Center is leader in children's culture

April 6, 2009

The Center for Children’s Literature and Culture is a unique inter-disciplinary, humanities-based center dedicated to the study of children’s culture and the production of innovative, creative works of scholarship and the imagination.

In the past, the center has co-hosted a series of international colloquia, “Transforming Encounters,” which have featured such scholars and public figures as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Genevieve Patte, Phillipe Cousteau, Richard Louv and Geoffrey Canada. The Center has helped sponsor a range of other public programs — from an exhibition of the childhood photographs of Jacques Henri Lartigue (in conjunction with the Harn Museum of Art) to the development of a comic book for use with migrant teens in North Florida.

The center also has produced “Recess!” — a nationally distributed, daily public radio program (http://www.recess.ufl.edu) about the dynamic cultures of childhood. The show has been called “a ‘New Yorker’ of kid’s stuff” because of its mix of biographical and historical notes, original stories, and reviews of the latest books, music, movies and other media being produced for children.

Currently, the center is developing a series of short, online documentaries about children’s culture, using UF’s remarkable Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/baldwin/baldwin.html, as one of its primary resources. The center hosts a monthly speakers’ series on children’s literature and culture. These “conversations” are free and open to the general public.

For more information about the center and any of its activities, please visit http://www.clas.ufl.edu/cclc, call 352-392-6650, ext. 290, or contact me at jcech@english.ufl.edu.

John Cech
Director, UF Center for the Study of Children’s Literature & Culture;
producer/host of “Recess!”