Mary Galbraith, PhD

Mary Galbraith grew up in Los Angeles and London, shuttling back and forth with her family via train and ocean liner three times in her first twelve years. Now she teaches children's literature. Because of her childhood, she's particularly interested in transatlantic literature--especially picture books by artists who were born in Europe and immigrated to the United States, often to escape war in their homelands. Professor Galbraith wrote her dissertation on the traumatic experiences of child characters in the first chapters of three classic English biographical novels: Jane Eyre, What Maisie Knew, and Great Expectations. She sees a great deal of literature about children as being motivated by authors' need to restage their own childhood experiences of extreme fright, grief, and perceived betrayal by adults. She promotes a new area of interdisciplinary studies: childhood studies, which brings together material from literature, psychology, history, anthropology, and neurobiology on childhood experience in the interests of "feeling from the other side" children's existential situation. Rather than approaching childhood from an adult standpoint, this area of studies attempts to articulate the child's experience at a very deep level using all the skills of adult language, science, and art.