The Lewis Carroll Visiting Fellow Talk:  Professor Alison Halsall

Free, but booking is essential.

Professor Alison Halsall (York University, Toronto), 2026-7 Lewis Carroll Visiting Fellow, will share recent research on how Lewis Carroll and illustrator John Tenniel developed foundational visual storytelling techniques together, based on Professor Halsall's intersecting interests in visual narrative, childhood readership, and archival study.

Professor Halsall says: “This talk will bring my intersecting interests in visual narrative, childhood readership, and archival study to the newly catalogued Lewis Carroll materials held at Christ Church and the Bodleian Libraries. Material in the Jon A. Lindseth Lewis Carroll Collection and the 1865 Michelson Alice offer opportunities to examine how Carroll orchestrated meaning at the level of the page. These materials allow the shaping of a text to be observed from manuscript design to printed page, revealing how Carroll and John Tenniel collaboratively developed visual pacing strategies. I hope to prove what I have long suspected: that this Carroll-Tenniel collaboration demonstrates visual storytelling in formation, one that anticipates modern graphic narrative logics.”

The Lewis Carroll Visiting Fellowship is offered jointly by the Bodleian Libraries and Christ Church, Oxford. The Lewis Carroll Visiting Fellowship supports researchers from outside Oxford whose work engages with Lewis Carroll and his interests, including children’s literature, literary illustration, 19th-century photography, Oxford history, and the cultural impact of mathematics.

Professor Halsall's talk will be followed by refreshments.

We regret that there is no step-free access to the Upper Library.