The Child of Nature – Feral Children and understanding the human being
From Romulus and Remus to Tarzan of the Apes, stories have spread of children cut off from human society and growing up instead in the wilderness, nurtured perhaps by wild animals. Michael Newton will be talking about the deeper meanings of these stories, and how for writers, filmmakers, psychologists and philosophers, they have been seen as a good way to comprehend what is unique (or not) about human beings, our relationship to the natural world, and how far we need language to be fully human.
Bio
Michael Newton is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children and Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981, both for Faber & Faber. On the subject of cinema, he has written on Kind Hearts and Coronets, Rosemary’s Baby, and It’s a Wonderful Life for the BFI Film Classics series and Show People: A History of the Film Star (Reaktion Books). He has edited Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son and a book of Victorian Fairy Tales, and an anthology of 19th and early 20th century science fiction for Oxford World’s Classics, and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories for Penguin Classics. He has taught at University College London (where he received his PhD), Central Saint Martins College of Art, and Princeton University; since 2006, he has taught literature and film at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. .
Curated and Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
