Julia Benner is Professor of Modern German Literature and Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Media at the Institute of German Literature at the Humboldt-University, Berlin. Her research interests are history and theory of children’s and young adult literature (and media), political aspects of children’s and young adult literature, exile literature, constructions of childhood.
Katharine Capshaw is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, USA, where she focuses on Black youth culture and social justice. Author of Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance and Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks, Capshaw is past president of the Children’s Literature Association and former editor of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. Co-editor of Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children’s Literature before 1900 and author of dozens of articles on race and children’s culture, Capshaw is at work on a monograph about Black children’s theatre of the 1970s.
Vanessa Joosen is full professor of English literature and children’s literature at the University of Antwerp. She is the author of, among others, Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales (Wayne State University Press, 2011), which won an ALA Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Publication, and co-editor of Grimm’s Tales Around the Globe (2014), for which she and Gillian Lathey received the ChLA Honour Award for edited book. Vanessa Joosen’s most recent research focuses on the intersections between age studies and children’s literature, which has resulted in the edited volume Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media (University of Mississippi Press, 2018) and the monograph Adulthood in Children’s Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018). In 2018, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for the project Constructing Age for Young Readers (CAFYR), where she and her research team will use methods from genetic criticism, digital humanities and reader response theory to study age in children’s books.
Élodie Malanda (PhD Sorbonne cité, AvH Alumni) is an Assistant Professor of Children’s Literature Studies at Tilburg University, focusing on children’s and YA literature in postcolonial contexts. Her current research deals with Black French and Black German children’s and YA literature, Congolese children's literature, antiracist narrative strategies and literary activism.
Emily Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Children’s Literature at Newcastle University (UK). Her first monograph, Growing Up with America: Youth, Myth, and National Identity, 1945–Present (2020), was the winner of the 2021 International Research Society for Children’s Literature Book Award. She has published articles on children’s literature and childhood studies in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including most recently in the Journal of American Studies. She recently finished a British Academy- and Nuffield Foundation-funded project, Beyond the School Gates: Children’s Contribution to Community Integration (2022–2025), and is working on her second monograph, The Anarchy of Children’s Archives: Children’s Literature and Global Citizenship Education in the American Century.
Frauke Pauwels is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. As part of the project ‘Constructing Age For Young Children’ she studied adaptations of Dutch children’s books. In her doctoral dissertation she explored the representation of scientists and technologists in contemporary fictional and nonfictional children’s literature. Her current research focuses on implicit bias in illustrations in Dutch children’s literature from 1800 to 1940. She published in several journals, among which Children’s Literature Association Quarterly and De Spiegel der Letteren.
Krzysztof Rybak is a research assistant at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw, Poland. He is a co-initiator of Grow (with Rosalyn Borst and Chiara Malpezzi), an initiative that aims at stimulating transnational dialogue and collaboration among young scholars of children’s literature. In 2018 and 2021 he received International Youth Library in Munich fellowship that he promotes on every occasion. For some time now his main research interest is children’s nonfiction that he investigates within a research project “Dziecięca książka informacyjna w XXI wieku: tendencje – metody badań – modele lektury” [Informational Children’s Book in the 21st Century: Trends – Research methods – Models of reading] (National Science Centre, Poland, 2021–2024). Besides academic activity, he also reviews children’s books for a Polish online magazine “Kultura Liberalna.” Between 2024 and 2025, he is supported by the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP).
Anna Stemmann (she/her) has been Professor of Modern German Literature specialising in children's and young adult literature at Leipzig University since 2021. In her doctoral thesis, she focussed on contemporary German-language adolescent novels. She researches and teaches in particular on contemporary literature, ecological crisis scenarios in German-language youth literature and comics. Her theoretical interests include gender studies, spatial theories and intermediality studies.
Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Education and Society, Malmö University, where he teaches children’s literature and creative writing. His current research interests lie in a/r/tography and play in children’s literature. He is the current editor of Bookbird.
Sara Van den Bossche is Assistant Professor of Youth Cultures and Literatures at Tilburg University (the Netherlands). In her doctoral dissertation (Ghent University, Belgium, 2015), she scrutinised the reception and canonisation of Swedish author Astrid Lindgren’s works in Flanders and the Netherlands. Her main interests are ethnic-cultural diversity, feminism, ideology criticism, cognitive criticism, canonisation, adaptation, picturebooks, and crossover literature. Since 2019, she has been teaching in the Erasmus Mundus International Master “Children’s Literature, Media, and Cultural Entrepreneurship” (CLMCE). She co-authored Children’s Literature through the Lens of Ethnic-Cultural Diversity (2020) and co-edited Never-ending Stories: Adaptation, Canonisation and Ideology in Children’s Literature (2014). Her recent publications include chapters in The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture (2023), and The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature (forthcoming). She is the author of the upcoming books Routledge Engagements with Children’s and Young Adult Literature (with Lydia Kokkola) and Children’s Classics, Critically: Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking. She has guest edited special issues of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, DiGeSt – Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, and Barnboken. In addition, she acts as a consultant on matters of ethnic-cultural diversity for institutions such as Flanders Literature and the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
Eva Van de Wiele is a scholar of children's periodicals and comics. She is a guest lecturer of Comics History at LUCA School of Arts Brussels, and co-teaches the MA course 'Comics and Graphic Novels' at Ghent University. She is a FWO postdoctoral researcher, located at the Universities of Ghent and Antwerp. Her project 'Reading Mickey' compares the contents of Mickey magazines published in Italy and France between the 1930s and 1960s and studies the reception of those magazines. She is the co-editor of the volume Sugar, Spice, and the Not So Nice. Comics Picturing Girlhood (Leuven University Press 2023) and of "Boundless Girls", a special issue of the journal Girlhood Studies (Berghahn 2024).