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  • ChLA International Committee

International Committee Welcomes New Members, Chair

The ChLA International Committee is pleased to welcome three new members to our team. Anuja Madan, Vera Veldhuizen, and Maria Truglio will serve three-year terms from 2020-2023. Nithya Sivashankar will serve as chair of the International Committee.

The International Committee wishes to thank outgoing chair Karen Sands-O'Connor and outgoing committee members Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Lucy Pearson for their time and dedication over the past three years. We are particularly grateful for Karen Sands-O'Connor's contributions to the 2019 International Panel focusing on BAME Children's Literature, and we look forward to their future contributions to the international children's literature community.

Nithya Sivashankar

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.

Anuja Madan

Anuja Madan is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Kansas State University, where she teaches courses in world literature, cultural studies, global comics, and children’s literature. She received her Ph.D. in English from University of Florida and her M.Phil. and M.A. in English from Delhi University. Her co-authored book, Notes of Running Feet: English in Primary Textbooks (with Prof. Rimli Bhattacharya, Sreyoshi Sarkar, and Nivedita Basu) grew out of a group study of Indian English-language textbooks. She has published articles on English-language picturebook adaptations of the Indian epic Mahabharata, redactions of classics in Indian textbooks, and Jean-Luc Godard's films. Her recent articles include one on a graphic novel retelling of the Indian epic Ramayana, published in Graphic Novels for Young Adults and Children: a Collection of Critical Essays (2017), edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox, and another on contemporary Indian animation films for children, which appears in The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature (2017), edited by John Stephens, Celia Abicalil Belmiro, Alice Curry, et al.

Vera Veldhuizen

Vera Veldhuizen is assistant professor in both European Languages and Cultures, and Arts, Media, Culture at the University of Groningen. Previously she attended Cambridge University for her PhD in children's literature, with Homerton College and the Faculty of Education, supervised by Maria Nikolajeva. She holds a BA from University College Roosevelt and an MSc in Literature and Society from Edinburgh University. Her research is focused on cognitive approaches to children's literature. Her PhD was on empathy, ethics and justice construction children's war literature. Her current project is on the impact and complexity of contrasting truth narratives in children's literature. She has presented her research at many international conferences and through several peer reviewed publications.

Maria Truglio

Maria Truglio received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University. She is Professor of Italian and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State (University Park). Her research investigates Italian literature from the nineteenth century to the present day with attention to questions of gender and national identity formation. She focuses on the field of children’s literature, bringing psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, and postcolonial methodologies to bear on texts written for young people from the unification period forward. Her first book, Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli (U of Toronto P, 2007) examined the works of the canonical Symbolist poet Giovanni Pascoli through a psychoanalytic lens, with attention to his conception of childhood. Her monograph Italian Children’s Literature and National Identity: Childhood, Melancholy, Modernity (Routledge, 2017) analyzed books for young readers in the period between unification and fascism (1861-1922). With Nicolás Fernández-Medina she co-edited the volume Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy (Routledge, 2016), which includes her discussion of Massimo Bontempelli's 1922 magical realist children's book. She is now researching how contemporary Italian children’s literature ascribes meanings to the “Mediterranean migration crisis” in light of Italy’s postcolonial context, and contributed an essay on this topic to the Children's Literature Association Quarterly special issue on refugees.

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.

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