International Committee Welcomes New Members, Chair

The ChLA International Committee is pleased to welcome three new members to our team. Lara Saguisag, Bornali Nath Dowerah, and Samira Abdur-Rahman will serve three-year terms from 2023-2026. Maria Truglio will continue serving on the International Committee. Lara Saguisag will serve as chair of the International Committee.

The International Committee wishes to thank outgoing chair Nithya Sivashankar and outgoing committee members Anuja Madan and Vera Veldhuizen for their time and dedication over the past three years. We are particularly grateful for Nithya Sivashankar's contributions to the Global South Speaker Series and ChLA Conference focus panels, and we look forward to their future contributions to the international children's literature community.

Dr. Lara Saguisag is Associate Professor and Georgiou Chair in Children’s Literature and Literacy at New York University. Her research, teaching, and community projects are informed by climate justice and energy justice movements. She is currently researching the ways children’s cultural forms naturalize and interrogate human relationships with fossil fuels. Lara’s other interests include comics and graphic novels, Philippine children’s literature, and transformative justice in education. Her monograph Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (Rutgers UP, 2018) examines how the intertwined discourses of childhood, citizenship, and nationhood were expressed in and complicated by Progressive Era newspaper comics. It received several honors, including the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society and an Eisner nomination for Best Academic/Scholarly Work. Saguisag is also the author of several children’s books, including Animal Games and Children of Two Seasons: Poems for Young People.

Dr. Bornali Nath Dowerah is Assistant Professor of English at Manohari Devi Kanoi Girls’ College, Dibrugarh, affiliated to Dibrugarh University, State of Assam, India. She teaches courses in American literature, British literature, Indian English and Indian Classical literature, Graphic narratives, Literary Theory, Partition literature and Communicative Skills. She received her B.A. in English Honours from Duliajan Girls’ College and M. A. in English from Dibrugarh University. She is EAP (English for Academic Purposes) trained faculty from University of Leicester in 2018. She did her M. Phil. in the field of Children’s literature and Ph. D. in Queer Young Adult American fiction from Dibrugarh University. Her M. Phil. research examined the Fantasy- Reality Syndrome in the context of magical realism in Salman Rushdie’s children’s fiction. In her Ph. D. she investigated upon the representation of queer narrators/characters as depicted by the American YA writers—David Levithan and Julie Anne Peters—with focus on identity formation and identity crisis in the character development process and narrative techniques. She attempted to analyze the texts through the methodologies of Psychoanalysis and Identity theory. Her first book Critical Perspectives (2018) is a corpus of critical readings in fiction and non-fiction texts. Besides, she has penned three books of poems--Crossroads (2019), Kobitaar Xoraai (2019), Rāmdhenu (2021). She has authored a collection of short stories for young readers titled Coffee Table Tales (2021) and a picture book for children with illustrations by Anusuya Borah titled Tiny Tales (2021). Her recent book is Route To Creative Writing (2022) meant for young writers. Besides, she has published numerous research articles in journals, newspapers, and edited books.

Samira Abdur-Rahman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Francisco. She holds a PhD in English from Rutgers University. She completed her BA in English Literature and Africana Studies at Rutgers University and an MA in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University. Previous to joining USF, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Frederick Douglass Institute at the University of Rochester. Her teaching and research interests include: African American Literature; childhood studies; autobiography studies; literary geography; and African Diaspora travel writing. Her working manuscript, Sites of Instruction: Black Childhood and the Geography of Education, explores the construction and performance of black childhood from the post-bellum period to twentieth century works of civil rights fiction and memoir. Reading across generic boundaries, the manuscript examines black writers' preoccupation with childhood and narratives of education as a means to map ulterior imaginings of place, self and futurity.

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.