Carol J. Singley, PhD, Associate Professor of English, Department of English

Carol Singley was awarded a Bildner Intercultural Fellowship for 2004-05. Her project, “The Literature of Childhood: Multicultural Perspectives,” allowed her to redesign part of a course that is regularly offered in the Department of English and is required of all majors earning certification to teach. It also funded a collection of multicultural children’s literature, which is housed in the Robeson Library. The collection allows Rutgers-Camden students and local residents to have easy access to a wide range of global literature for children.

Carol Singley recently co-edited with Caroline Levander The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (Rutgers University Press, 2003).

This project is about American adoption narratives from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. This project is the first to situate adoption narratives in cultural and social history, and the first to analyze adoption in relation to American themes and changing intellectual, religious, and scientific thought. Stories, in particular, reveal authors' and readers' attitudes toward adoption and demonstrate how adoption was or might be practiced in a given period and among various groups of people.

Specifically, this project accomplishes three goals. 1) It establishes a discourse of adoption, explaining how the disruption of genealogy and formation of new family ties radically shapes the identity of the child, birthparents, and adoptive parents. It illuminates complex practices and attitudes as they change in response to social, economic, and religious forces. Adoption - represented in literature as both "second best" and as ennobling or salvational - inscribes our most tenaciously and ambiguously held beliefs about lineage, children's best welfare, and the effects of nature and nurture. 2) It defines a narrative poetics of adoption. 3) It suggests a distinct quality of American adoption, derived from the nation's emphasis on individual rights and "fresh starts." The US led western nations by passing the first adoption legislation to protect the welfare of the child, and American history is often described in terms of a child's development. Adoption serves as a trope for the American story, for the tale of a nation that broke away from its birth parent, England, and created a new identity for itself in an adopted land.

Other publications and presentations by Carol Singley on Childhood and Adoption in Literature

Her article, “Words for Children,” is forthcoming in A Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865. Ed. Shirley Samuels. Blackwell Publishers.

Carol Singley’s work on adoption in literature continues with a presentation she made on “Teaching Adoption Fiction” at the Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Pittsburgh, March 2004.

For more information, please contact Dr. Carol Singley