Carol Pertuz | Exploration of the Infinite Wound and Its Interstices as the Core of the Migratory Experience in Literature with a Child’s Perspective

I am a PhD Candidate at Utrecht University, affiliated with the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON). My research, positioned at the intersection of childhood, literary, and migration studies, proposes a framework centred on two symbolic motifs—the infinite wound and the frontier—to analyse migration narratives through the lens of childhood. Through close reading and comparative analysis, I examine a curated corpus of nine literary works that foreground a child-centred perspective on migration. Spanning diverse genres, languages, and generations, these texts reflect the complex dynamics of European migration across the 20th and 21st centuries, including internal displacement, emigration, and immigration, and offer a rich temporal and spatial understanding of migration experiences as depicted by writers who lived them firsthand.