Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Girlpower?: Teenage Heroines in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction

Date and Time
June 19, 2012

Location

Event Details

Katherine R. Broad, who recently completed her dissertation in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, will discuss representations of female protagonists in dystopian fiction for young adults.

Recently we have seen an explosion of young adult (YA) dystopian novels featuring strong, savvy female leads who fight back against oppressive forces in nightmarish future worlds. This talk will address representations of gender and sexuality in the YA dystopian genre to consider how The Hunger Games, Uglies, and other best-selling series do—and do not— imagine social change, especially for women and girls.

This research is based on Katherine Broad’s dissertation on romance in contemporary utopian fiction, written in the Wertheim Study at The New York Public Library. Her talk forms part of a collection she co-edited, Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, forthcoming from Routledge.

For more lectures from the Wertheim Study, click here.