Dr Lucy Stone, awarded 2025 Research Grant from the International Research Society for Children’s Literature

Congratulations to Dr Lucy Stone, Assistant Professor in the School of English, who was awarded the 2025 Research Grant from the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL).

Dr Stone’s grant was announced at the 27 the biennial IRSCL Congress, held at the University of Salamanca this summer. The grant will be used to fund archival research for Dr Stone’s ongoing project and planned monograph, “Picturing War: Children’s Representations of Lived Experiences of Displacement in the Nazi Era”.

This research project aims to recover children’s representations of lived experiences of displacement in the Nazi era. Conducting research in six archives in Europe and the US, it will study unpublished juvenilia (drawings and writings in French, German and English) author-illustrators Judith Kerr (1923 - 2019), Tomi Ungerer (1931 - 2019) and Lore Segal (1928 - 2024) and artist Milein Cosman (1921 - 2019) made in exile. Exile for Kerr and Cosman involved a succession of geographical removes from Germany in their childhoods, which ended in Britain, where they both eventually found new homes. Segal, too, found refuge in Britain: she was sent from Austria to England as part of the Kindertransport rescue mission in 1938. By contrast, Ungerer felt he became a refugee in his own country at the age of eight (Carey, ‘Tomi Ungerer’), when the Nazis arrived in and occupied his home region of Alsace. The ‘return home’ of Alsace to France in 1945 was only the beginning of a second period of political and emotional exile for the now adolescent, who saw similarities between the National Socialist dictatorship and the French Fourth Republic. Each child narrated their journeys from their first homes and experiences of war in visual and verbal forms, as they unfolded during the Nazi era. They all survived the Hitler years to become authors and/or illustrators. Their oeuvres show how significant upheaval in their young lives played out over their life courses, as reflected in their later works.