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  • ChLA International Committee

International Committee Welcomes New Members

The ChLA International Committee is pleased to welcome two new members to our team. Heather Cyr and Deirdre McMahon will serve three-year terms from 2021-2024. They will join Nithya Sivashankar (chair), Ada Bieber, Anuja Madan, Vera Veldhuizen, and Maria Truglio as members of the International Committee.

The International Committee wishes to thank outgoing committee members Poushali Bhadury and Danilo M. Baylen for their time and dedication over the past three years. We look forward to their continued contributions to the field of international children's literature.


Heather Cyr

Heather Cyr is a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s English Department in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada where she teaches composition, Children’s Lit and YA Lit. She completed her PhD at Queen’s University in 2017 with a dissertation on real world landscapes in children’s fantasies. She has published on Rick Riordan and presented conference papers on spaces and places from museums to gardens. She is currently working on a critical edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden with Dr. Shelley King.

Deirdre H. McMahon

Deirdre H. McMahon, English and Philosophy, Drexel University (Ph.D., University of Iowa). My teaching and scholarship address 19th-century British literature and culture, postcolonial studies, and global children’s and young adult literature. My publications have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (Gale), Studies in the Novel, Academe, and KronoScope as well as in scholarly collections, including The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain (Ashgate, 2016), which I co-edited. I have presented and organized panels at international conferences (Modern Language Association; Postcolonial Studies Association; Children’s Literature Association) on translation politics and children’s publishing. A long-standing member of ChLA, I was honored to serve on and then chair the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Committee (2012-2018), which draws attention to children’s authors from around the world and to literacy as a human right. I welcome the opportunity to contribute to ChLA’s initiatives in international research and scholarly collaboration.


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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