events — J. Michelle Coghlan

Tasting Children’s Literature

An Edible Read-a-thon

A family-friendly, immersive session exploring foods in children's literature.

From the apple that Snow White should not have bitten and the drink that makes Alice’s trip to Wonderland possible to the feast gobbled by the very hungry little caterpillar in Eric Carle’s now classic 1969 story and the nut that the mouse finally gets to savour in Julia Donaldson’s contemporary classic The Gruffalo, food has long played a central role in children’s literature.

“Tasting Children’s Literature: An Edible Read-A-Thon” is an immersive experience and read-a-thon of classic and contemporary children’s literature aimed at young children up to the age of 8.

The workshop engages children in drawing pictures of and telling stories about the foods that come to life in their favourite stories, as well as the foods that mean most to them and their communities.

Organised by Dr. J. Michelle Coghlan and facilitated by academics and students in the University of Manchester's Programme in American Studies. Presented in partnership with Creative Manchester as part of the Manchester City of Literature Festival of Libraries in 2023, 2024 and 2026.

March 2023, 2024

Digitising Radical Motherhood

Community Digitisation Day

Hosted by the Working Class Movement Library

Brought together University of Manchester undergraduate + MA students as well as local community participants for a series of 1.5-hour hands-on workshops at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. Participants met with the lead curator at the Working Class Movement Library, learned how to digitise rare materials, perused a variety of rare posters, pamphlets, memoirs and other bits from the WCML’s collection which deal with motherhood and radical movements (or demands for better structures of care), selected a set of items to ditigise and jointly reflected on why these item should be made available to a broader audience through digitisation.

9 March 2023

Radical Motherhood Then & Now

Public Roundtable Discussion for International Women’s Day

Hosted by the Working Class Movement Library

Featuring Dr. Kate Connelly (Arcadia) on the free nurseries that Sylvia Pankhurst organized in East London, Dr. Nick Grant (UEA) on South African anti-apartheid campaigner Dora Tamana's travels to the World Congress of Mothers in Switzerland in 1955, Dr. Monica Pearl (Manchester) on women's AIDS memoirs and the politics of motherhood in ACT-UP, and myself on late- nineteenth-century US anarchist activists who reconfigured motherhood and grappled with maternal ambivalence in ways that continue to resonate with our own moment.

Spring 2023

Re-imagining Motherhood Now Project

The Covid-19 pandemic ushered in both a global health crisis and an urgent conversation on motherhood: recent Pew research surveys reveal mothers were far more likely to bear the brunt of childcare duties during the pandemic and recent studies suggest that there is, as a recent Financial Times article puts it,“mounting evidence that the pandemic disproportionately affected working women” (Igielnik 2021;Romei 2021).Yet as the contemporary visual, literary and performance culture of motherhood reveals, the pandemic primarily magnified long unresolved cracks in the system and theissueof whosestories getto betoldabout these experiences. This project, funded by a 2022-3 School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Social Responsibility grant, brought together scholars, artists, activists and mental health practitioners for a series of immersive public events at the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Working Class Movement Library reflecting on the challenges of contemporary motherhood. It also featured a hands-on creative arts workshop aimed at directly engaging audiences in representing and re-imagining the lived experience of motherhood now and led by artist and art psychotherapist Sarah Greaves.