Arm’s Length: A Rhetoric Of Character in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. He is a past president of the Children’s Literature Association.
Paula T. Connolly is a professor and is Coordinator of Children’s Literature Programs in the English Department at the University of North Carolina where she teaches courses in children’s literature, culture, and film, including work on Disney films. She has published on Disney’s recreation of Winnie-the-Pooh, including in Walt Disney, From Reader to Storyteller: Essays on the Literary Inspirations (eds. Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West, 2015).
Rachel Conrad is Professor of Childhood Studies at Hampshire College. She is the author of Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency (2020), a study of young poets’ shaping of time as an expression of youth agency in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century United States. Conrad is also co-editor of Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods (2020), and an editor with the book series “Childhoods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children and Youth” at the University of Massachusetts Press. In The Lion and the Unicorn’s special issue on children’s literature and climate change, she explores contemporary young climate activists’ crafting of time in their nonfiction prose writings as a key component of their activism.
Rachel Falconer is Professor of English Literature at the University of Lausanne. She is author of four monographs, including The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership (2009), Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945 (2007), and Seamus Heaney, Virgil and the Good of Poetry (2022). She has also edited six volumes, including Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on Her Work (2014), and with Madeleine Scherer A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature (2020). She teaches poetry, young adult and contemporary fiction, environmental humanities, and classical reception studies.
Hannah Field is senior lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader (2019) and co-editor of Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present (2015). Along with Kiera Vaclavik, she is currently leading an interdisciplinary research network about childhood, clothing, and creativity.
Macarena García González is Associate Researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies in Educational Justice and Lecturer at the Faculty of Communications of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She holds a PhD in social anthropology and cultural studies from the University of Zurich and an MA in cultural studies from the University of Maastricht. She has the Study of Multicultural Literature (CSCML) since its inception in 2011 and has also served as a selector on the Coretta Scott Kind Book Award Jury and the United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY)’s Hans Christian Andersen Award Nominating Committee.
Kathy Merlock Jackson is 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 Jaques is 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 Kachorsky is 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 Kertzer is 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. Knox is 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-Meibauer is 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. Kunze is 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 Larkin is 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.