International Committee Welcomes New Members, Chair

The ChLA International Committee is pleased to welcome three new members to our team. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Lucy Pearson, and Karen Sands-O'Connor will serve three-year terms from 2017-2020. Vanessa Joosen will serve as chair of the International Committee.

Vanessa Joosen specializes in English literature and children's literature studies at Antwerp University. Her research interests include the construction of childhood, adulthood and old age in literature, postmodern fairy-tale rewritings, the international reception of fairy tales, genetic criticism of children's books and digital approaches to children's literature studies. She also co-supervises a doctoral project on STEM representations in children's books and a doctoral project on hypermedia fiction for adolescents.

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer is a professor in the German Department at the University of Tübingen. She has been a guest professor at the universities of Växjö, Sweden, and Vienna, Austria. She is an internationally active scholar who has published three monographs and more than twenty (co-)edited volumes in the realm of children's literature research. She is a co-editor of two book series: "Children's Literature, Culture and Coginition" (John Benjamins) and "Studies in European Children's and Young Adult Literature" (Winterverlag). Her research interests are children's classics, picturebook research, children's films, the relationship between children's literature and the Avant-garde, and the interfaces of children's literature and literacy studies. Most recently, she has edited "The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks" (2018).

Lucy Pearson has a PhD in the Children's Publishing of the 1960s and 1970s from Newcastle University, where she has taught a range of children's literature courses and is a research collaborator with Seven Stories, Newcastle University’s Centre for Children’s Literature. Her research interests are focused around the role of literature in society from an ideological and practical perspective, particularly in the context of children’s literature. Her research has appeared in International Research in Children's Literature, Postwar: British Literature in Transition 1940-60, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: 1914-2000, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and her published books include The Making of Modern Children’s Literature in Britain: Publishing and Criticism in the 1960s and 1970s and Children's Literature with Peter Hunt. She is currently working on a history of the CILIP Carnegie Medal. Follow along with her observations on past winners: https://carnegieproject.wordpress.com/.

Karen Sands-O'Connor received her Ph.D. from the University of Wales, Cardiff, and specializes in children's literature, twentieth-century British literature, literature about and from the Caribbean, and literary criticism. She has published articles in journals such as Children's Literature Association Quarterly, American Transcendental Quarterly, and The Lion and the Unicorn, as well as in multiple edited collections. Her collection, Internationalism in Children's Series, of which she is co-editor, appeared in February 2014 from Palgrave-Macmillan. Her other books include Soon Come Home to this Island: West Indians in Children's Literature (Routledge, 2007), and Back in the Spaceship Again: Juvenile Science Fiction Series Since 1945, co-authored with Marietta Frank (Greenwood, 1999). She was a 2015-16 Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Newcastle University in the UK.

The ChLA International Committee consists of six rotating members elected for three-year terms and a chair appointed by the President with the approval of the Executive Board for a term of three years. Terms begin immediately following the ChLA annual business meeting.

For more information about the International Committee, please visit our About Page.