A Companion to Children's Literature

Kathy Merlock Jacksonis a professor of communication at Virginia Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses in media studies and children’s culture. She is the author of over a hundred articles, chapters, and reviews and has written or edited nine books, four of them on Disney-related topics and one on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood . She is president of the Popular Culture Association and the former editor of The Journal of American Culture .

Zoe Jaquesis Professor of Children’s Literature in the Faculty of Education, Cambridge University, and Dean of Homerton College. She is the author of Children’s Literature and the Posthuman (2015) and co-author of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: A Publishing History (2013). She runs an Arts and Humanities Research Council network on children’s literature in US and UK archives and is co-general editor of the Cambridge History of Children’s Literature in three volumes (forthcoming 2023).

Dani Kachorskyis an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Learning Sciences in the College of Education & Human Development at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. She is a professor of children’s and adolescent literature as well as literacy. As a researcher, she works to understand multimodal and digital forms of children’s and adolescent literature at the site of production, the site of the text itself, and the site of reception. In particular, she is interested in how different theoretical perspectives can deepen researchers’ understanding of multimodal and digital texts, how readers transact with these texts, and the pedagogical approaches that support the use of these texts in classrooms and other contexts.

Adrienne Kertzeris Professor Emerita, Department of English, University of Calgary. Recipient of the F.E.L. Priestley Prize for “ Fugitive Pieces : Listening as a Holocaust Survivor’s Child,” she received the Children’s Literature Association Honor Book Award and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Scholarship on a Jewish Subject for My Mother’s Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust . Her recent publications include: “‘I remember. Oh, I remember’: Traumatic Memory, Agency, and the American Identity of Holocaust Time Travelers,” in Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods , edited by Rachel Conrad and Brown Kennedy, and “‘One Jew, one half-Jew, a WASP, and an Indian’: Diversity in The View from Saturday ,” in Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children’s Literature at the Newbery Centennial , edited by Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl.

Emily J.M. Knoxis an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her book, Book Banning in 21st Century America (2015), is the first monograph in the Beta Phi Mu Scholars’ Series. She also recently edited Trigger Warnings: History, Theory Context (2017) and co-edited Foundations of Information Ethics (2019). Her articles have been published in the Library Quarterly , Library and Information Science Research , and the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy . Emily serves on the boards of the Beta Phi Mu and the National Coalition Against Censorship. Her research interests include information access, intellectual freedom and censorship, information ethics, information policy, and the intersection of print culture and reading practices. She is also a member of the Mapping Information Access research team.

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibaueris a professor in the German Department at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She has been a guest professor at the universities of Växjö, Sweden, and Vienna, Austria. She has written four books and (co)edited 20 volumes in the fields of children’s literature research, literacy studies, picturebook research, and children’s films. Her recent publications are Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature (ed. with Anja Müller, 2017), Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature (ed. with Nina Goga, 2017), The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (2018), and Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education (ed. with Åse Marie Ommundsen and Gunnar Haaland, 2022).

Peter C. Kunzeis visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. His work examines the industrial dimensions of children’s culture, and his current book project, Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance , traces creative and economic relationships between Broadway and Hollywood in the late twentieth century via the Walt Disney Company. His children’s literature research has appeared in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly , The Lion and the Unicorn , Prizing Children’s Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards , and The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film .

Susan Larkinis Professor of English and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. At Virginia Wesleyan, she teaches courses in children’s and adolescent literature, cultural studies, and women’s and gender studies. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and she has published within English studies and cultural studies on Mr. Rogers, Judy Blume, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Walt Disney, and a variety of contemporary women’s memoirs. Her work can be found in journals such as A/b: Auto/Biography Studies , Academic Exchange Quarterly , Children’s Literature Review , and Gender and Sexuality Studies and as part of many edited collections. She earned a BA from Wheaton College in Massachusetts and her MA and PhD from Illinois State University.

Elizabeth Marshallis Associate Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses on children’s literature and popular culture. Her interdisciplinary research on representations of childhood within texts for and about the child has appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn , College English , Language Arts , and Women’s Studies Quarterly . She is the author of Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence (2018) and the co-author (with Leigh Gilmore) of Witnessing Girlhood (2019).

Marianne Martensis Associate Professor at Kent State University’s School of Information. Her research and teaching are international in scope and cover: the interconnected fields of youth services librarianship, literacy development, and children’s publishing; the multiliteracies required to interpret nonlinear, multimodal materials; and issues of digital divide and social justice in young people’s access to information. She uses co-design methodologies for reading research. Martens served as Principal Investigator for the Kent State team on the USAID Strengthening Education in North-East Nigeria States (SENSE) grant, working on supporting reading instruction in Northeast Nigeria. Martens is the author of Publishers, Readers and Digital Engagement: Participatory Forums and Young Adult Publishing (2016) and The Forever Fandom of Harry Potter: Balancing Fan Agency and Corporate Control (2019). Prior to her academic career, Martens worked in children’s publishing in New York. You can read more about her at mariannemartens.org.

Debra Mitts-Smithresearches and writes about the wolf in folklore, literature, art, and science for the magazine International Wolf . Her book Picturing the Wolf in Children’s Literature was published in 2010. She has taught children’s literature, young adult literature, and storytelling at the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, and Dominican University. She is currently working on a book about cultural history of the wolf.