JUNE 5 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Child's Play: Archiving Children and Their Worlds
feat. Hannah Zeavin, Annie Baker, and Leslie Jamison
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Childhood has never been more archivable. Each day our phones greets us with images of ourselves--and our children--sliding backwards through time. But historically, archiving childhood has been a difficult task, and children have largely been presenced through fragments and material culture--the stuff of childhood. Join filmmaker and playwright Annie Baker, memoirist Leslie Jamison, and historian Hannah Zeavin for an evening on approaches to revisiting childhood, from fabulation to the iPhone, as we celebrate the launch of Zeavin's latest book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century.
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor and works as an Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Zeavin is the author of the award winning books, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021, MIT Press) and Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century (MIT Press, April 2025). She is at work on her third book, All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance (US: Penguin Press; UK: Fern Press), for which she received a 2022 Works in Progress Grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation and a 2024 Whiting Foundation Non-Fiction Grant. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new magazine for psychoanalysis.
Annie Bakeris a writer and director. She is the author of the plays Infinite Life, John, The Flick, and The Antipodes, and she wrote and directed the movie Janet Planet. She was a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Leslie Jamison's new book is Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams; the collection of essays Make It Scream, Make It Burn, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She writes for numerous publications including the New Yorker, The Atlantic, the New York Times, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn..