60 Years of the Lore and Language of Schoolchildren

A free half-day conference to be held at Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

Friday, 15 November 2019, 2.30–5.30 pm

Organised by the University of Sheffield, in partnership with the British Academy Research Project ‘Childhoods and Play’, and in association with Oxford University Press.

The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren by Iona and Peter Opie was published by Oxford University Press on 5 November 1959. It broke new ground in the study of contemporary school-aged children’s culture. This half-day conference looks back on the Opies’ work in this field, and considers children’s language and folklore, and the sources and methods by which it is studied, in the sixty years since 1959. We are delighted to welcome our invited speakers and to be able to host the conference at Oxford University Press. The conference will also mark the formal launch of the Iona and Peter Opie Archive website (www.opiearchive.org), containing the first digitised materials from the Opies’ papers at the Bodleian Library. The website makes thousands of schoolchildren’s contributions received by the Opies available. Cataloguing work at the University of Sheffield, as part of the Playing the Archive project (https://playingthearchive.net), has enabled the content of these documents to be searched at item level, opening up new possibilities for secondary research and re-use. This exciting new resource and its capabilities will be showcased as part of the conference.

The conference is free but please register in advance via the conference Eventbrite page.