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. She earned a BA from Wheaton College in Massachusetts and her MA and PhD from Illinois State University.
Elizabeth Marshall is 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 Martens is 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-Smith researches 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.
Emma McGilp is a primary teacher in the Scottish Borders. She has a PhD from the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral research explored the multiliteracies learners developed when translating the verbal and the visual in international picturebooks. As a researcher she has published and presented about the potential of using multilingual picturebooks in the classroom. Research interests include literacies, translated and international children’s literature, reader response, and practitioner enquiry. Current projects include an international partnership with a school in Nepal using digital literacies and coding for a social purpose and reflecting on the affordances of technologies to support global learning and citizenship during the pandemic.
Mary Jeanette Moran is Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on children’s and adolescent literature that focus on issues of ethical and feminist theory, narrative voice, and social justice. Her publications include articles on speculative fiction, Anne of Green Gables, the Judy Bolton mystery series, and feminist emotion in middle-grade family stories. Her current project investigates the intersections between feminist ethics, particularly ethics of care, and fantasy for children and young adults. She is an active member of the Children’s Literature Association, where she has served on several committees, including the Astrid Lindgren Committee and the Grants Committee.
Claudia Nelson is Professor Emerita of English at Texas A&M University. She is author or editor of 13 books, most recently Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Literature: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals (2019, co-authored with Anne Morey). She is a past president of the Children’s Literature Association and past editor of the ChLA Quarterly; her work has been recognized with the ChLA Book Award and the ChLA Article Award, as well as with Choice Outstanding Academic Title and Highly Recommended Title designations. With Elisabeth Wesseling and Andrea Mei-Ying Wu, she is currently editing The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture.
Gretchen Papazian is a professor of English at Central Michigan University, where she teaches children’s literature, diversity literatures, and American literature. Her publications include a book chapter on Easy Readers (“Reading Reading in the Early Reader” [2017]); as well as articles on picturebooks (“Color Multiculturally” [2018] and “Colorful Feelings” [2020]) and video games (“A Possible Childhood” [2010]); and two edited essay collections (Game on, Hollywood! [with Joseph Michael Sommers] and Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults [with Karen Coats forthcoming]). She is also a founding member of Central Michigan University Press’s series Scholarship and Lore: Games for Learning, a publication venue for academic, peer-reviewed games for game-based learning in higher education.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold is a senior lecturer/associate professor at the University of Glasgow, where she teaches and researches children’s and young adult (YA) literature and book culture. Her research specialism is inclusive youth literature and book culture, with a particular focus on the representation of people of color, and the experiences of authors and readers of color. Melanie has published widely on the topic, alongside numerous publications about contemporary book culture. Her book
