Global Committee Welcomes New Members

The ChLA Global Committee is delighted to welcome several new members: Tharini Viswanath (U. of South Carolina), serving 2025-2028, joins Melanie Ramdarshan Bold (U. of Glasgow) and Chengcheng You (U. of Macau), serving 2024-2027. Maria Truglio (Penn State U), Bornali Nath Dowerah (Manohari Devi Kanoi Girls’ College), and Samira Abdur-Rahman (The College of New Jersey) will continue to serve on the committee, 2023-2026, as will Deirdre McMahon (Drexel University), 2024-2027. Ngozi Onoura (Eastern Illinois University) will serve as board liaison. Deirdre McMahon serves as chair.

The Global Committee wishes to thank outgoing chair Lara Saguisag (New York University) and outgoing committee member Carrie Anne Thomas (The Ohio State University) for their dedication to the worldwide study and advocacy of children’s literature. We are particularly grateful for Carrie Anne Thomas’s keen eye and many insights that strengthened the focus panels each year and for Lara Saguisag's championship of the Global South Speaker Series. Carrie Anne has joined the U. of Notre Dame Global and Lara Saguisag is serving as ChLA President. We look forward to their continued contributions to the international children's literature community.

Dr. Melanie Ramdarshan Bold is Professor of Youth Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow, researching and teaching children’s and young adult literature and book culture. Melanie’s work explores how young people’s identities shape their reading and writing, and how literature fosters belonging, self-expression, agency, and social change. Melanie focuses on underrepresented voices, examining how writers and readers navigate marginalisation and how storytelling challenges norms and builds community.

Melanie Ramdarshan Bold has published five books, including Inclusive Young Adult Fiction (Palgrave, 2019), YA Anthologies: Amplifying Voices, Building Community (CUP, 2024), and International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity (CUP, 2024). A forthcoming book, Please Look After This Bear: How Paddington Became British (OUP, 2026, with Aishwarya Subramanian), explores immigration, identity, and national culture through Paddington Bear.

Beyond academia, Melanie champions inclusive youth literature through advisory roles with the CLPE Reflecting Realities project, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the CILIP Carnegie & Kate Greenaway Awards, and other initiatives. Melanie also works with schools, publishers, and cultural organisations to support inclusive practices and empower young people’s creativity.

Dr. Tharini Viswanath is an Assistant Professor of Children’s and Young Adult Literature at The University of South Carolina. Her research and teaching interests are informed by the questions surrounding agency as evidenced by her work on the agency of feminine characters and characters of color in young adult novels, of creators, readers, and characters in picture books, and of students and their instructors in the children’s literature classroom. Her research has been published in a number of edited collections and international journals including South Asia, The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, The ALAN Review, Papers, and Jeunesse. Tharini is currently working on a book project, The Discursive Material: Social and Embodied Constructions of Femininity in Speculative Young Adult Fiction, which examines how feminine adolescent characters’ access to language and acceptance of their own unique embodiments serves to empower them. Tharini also enjoys working on television shows, Disney films, and other visual media for young audiences.

Dr. Chengcheng You is an Associate Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau. Her articles can be found in A&HCI journals, such as Children’s Literature in Education, Neohelicon, Animation, The Lion and the Unicorn, International Research in Children’s Literature and English Studies. She has also contributed six book chapters to various edited volumes, such as Representing Childhood and Atrocity (SUNY, 2022). Chengcheng is also the co-author of the monograph Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism: Children, Animals, and Poetry (Routledge, 2022). Her research primarily explores the interdisciplinary aspects of children’s literature, such as anthropomorphism, environmental ethics, translation studies, and adaptation studies. Her work also extends to comparative literature and culture, with a special emphasis on Chinese children’s literature and its cultural specificities within the global context of the genre.

The ChLA Global 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 Global Committee, please visit our About Page.