Making Waves Lecture Series: Dr Niall Sreenan Abnormal families: a new literary history of child adoption
As part of the Making Waves Lecture Series, the Development team invites you to our next event with Dr Niall Sreenan from the School of Modern Languages.
Dr Sreenan joined the University of St Andrews in August 2023 as Lecturer in Comparative Literature in the School of Modern Languages. His research and writing are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, including evolutionary theory and nineteenth-century realism, utopian writing and theory, the representation of islands in literature and philosophy, and Irish writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This talk will offer an introduction to his most recent work, the history of adoption in literature, myth and culture, examining how “abnormal families” have been imagined and interrogated in Western culture.
Adoption is an ancient and widespread practice, documented in cultures across the globe, from Ancient Rome to modern Korea. Today, the shame and taboo that once surrounded adoption seems a thing of the past: a survey conducted in 2024 suggested that 65% of people in the UK believe there is no such thing as a “normal family”.
Yet adoption continues to challenge some of our most fundamental assumptions about family, parenthood and belonging. And, while many of our most cherished cultural heroes, from Moses to Luke Skywalker, are adoptees of one sort or another, we rarely discuss these figures in the context of their so-called “fictive” kinship relations.
By exploring the literary and cultural history of adoption, this lecture hopes to reveal how adoption can be understood, not as a deviation from the norm, but as a template for understanding the complexity of family relations in the 21st century.
This event will be held at Rathbones, 10 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 2PF.