International Committee Welcomes New Members, Chair

The ChLA International Committee is pleased to welcome two new members to our team. Ada Bieber and Nithya Sivashankar will serve three-year terms from 2019-2022. Karen Sands-O'Connor will serve as chair of the International Committee.

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.

Ada Bieber, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Department of German Literature at Humboldt-University, Berlin. Ada is the author of a monograph on James Krüss' 'Tales of 101 Days' (2012), co-editor of an edited volume on modern robinsonades, as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Her research areas are German and international children’s and youth literature and film, including political literature, Holocaust and exile, East German children’s narratives, picture books, and downriver narratives. Ada currently serves on the Academic Advisory Board for the Yearbook Children’s and Youth Literature of the German Children’s and Youth Literature Research Association (2017-21), and on the ChLA Publications Advisory Board (2017-2020).

Nithya Sivashankar is a doctoral candidate in the Literature for Children and Young Adults program at The Ohio State University. She has a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in South Asian Studies and a Minor in English. She earned an MA in Writing for Children from University of Central Lancashire, UK, and worked as an editor at Karadi Tales, a children’s publishing house in India. She was awarded the 2017-2018 Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop Scholarship for Research in Children’s Literature. Her work on international and multicultural conflict narratives, illustrated books, narratology, and dramatic inquiry has appeared, or is forthcoming in the journals, English Teaching: Practice & Critique (2016) and Research on Diversity in Youth Literature (2019), and in edited collections such as Engaging Critically with Multicultural Young Adult Literature in the Secondary Classroom (2019), Immigrant Experiences: Expanding the School-Home-Community Dialogue (2019), and Literary Cultures and Twentieth Century Childhoods.

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.