Professor Evelyn Arizpe holds the Chair of Children’s Literature at the University of Glasgow and is Leader of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree programme, “Children’s Literature, Media and Culture”. She has taught and published widely, both nationally and internationally. While at the University of Cambridge, with Morag Styles, she co-authored, Children Reading Picturebooks: Interpreting visual texts (2003), updated and revised in 2023 with a new subtitle, New contexts and approaches to picturebooks. In 2014 she co-authored Visual Journeys through Wordless Narratives, which won the Literacy Research Association’s “Edward B. Fry” award. She has co-edited Children as Readers in Children’s Literature: The power of text and the importance of reading (2016) as well as Young People Reading: Empirical research across international contexts (2018). Her research, which explores the role of books for children alongside themes of displacement, conflict and peacebuilding, has been funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and The British Academy in the UK. Evelyn has been on the jury for the Hans C. Andersen Award in 2022 and 2024. She was President of the International Research Society on Children’s Literature (IRSCL) from 2019-2023 and remains on the current Executive Board as Past President.

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.

    Ada Bieber

    Ada Bieber is Senior Lecturer at the Department of German Literature at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Her research focuses on international children’s and youth literature and film of the twentieth and twenty-first century, with emphasis on Holocaust literature, GDR literature and film, urban literature, art & picture books as well as island and river studies. Ada is the author of a monograph on James Krüss’ (2012), co-editor of a volume on robinsonades (2009) and a special issue on political youth literature and film in East Germany (2019), which address political crisis situations and individual responses in juvenile fiction. Her scholarship has appeared in "The Lion and the Unicorn," "Children’s Literature", "Limbus: Australian Yearbook of German Literary and Cultural Studies" and "Colloquia Germanica".

    Nicola Daly is a sociolinguist and Associate Professor in the Division of Education, University of Waikato, where she teaches children’s literature, and leads the Postgraduate Certificate in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. She also co-directs the Waikato Picturebook Research Unit. Her research focus is multilingual picturebooks, and their role in perpetuating and challenging language attitudes. She was a Fulbright New Zealand Scholar at the University of Arizona, USA in 2019/2020.

    Vanessa Joosen

    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.


    Lorraine Kerslake is a professor who teaches in the English Department at Alicante University. She has been an active member of the Spanish research group on ecocriticism, GIECO, since 2010. She is also a member of the Research Institute for Gender Studies at Alicante University and leads the research project Women Who Write Animals  (CIGE/2021/153). From 2016 to 2020 she was managing editor of the journal Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. She is a member of the advisory board of EASLCE: The European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment and a member of the executive board for IRSCL: The International Research Society for Children’s Literature. She is currently co-editor of the journal Climate Literacy in Education and has published widely on children’s literature and ecocriticism. She is author of The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes’s Writing for Children (Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of Imaginative Ecologies: Inspiring Change through the Humanities (Brill,2021). Her most recent publications include: “Reconnecting with Nature through Haiku”. Climate Literacy in Education Journal. Issue 1. 2023; “Aesthetic Entanglements in the Age of the Anthropocene: A Posthuman Reading of Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature 60, no. 4 (2022): 38-47.; “Reading The Iron Woman in Times of Crisis as a Tale of Hope”. Children’s Literature in Education 53, 439–453 (2022).

    Anna Kérchy is Professor in English Literature at the University of Szeged, Hungary, where she is the head of the Doctoral Program in Literatures and Cultures in English, leader of the Gender Studies Research Group, and founding director of Children’s and Young Adult Literatures and Culture Research Centre. She is teaching courses on reading and translating nonsense literature, fairy tale rewritings, intersections of Victorian and postmodern fantastic imagination, and women’s life-writing among others. She enjoys exploring children’s and young adult literature from interdisciplinary perspectives blending literary theory, body studies, and post-semiotics (with a special interest in poststructuralist language philosophy, corporeal narratology, somaesthetics, critical posthumanism and theories of transmediation and image-textual dynamics). Her publications include the monographs Alice in Transmedia Wonderland (2016) that won the HUSSE book award, Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter (2008), Essays on Feminist Aesthetics, Narratology, and Body Studies (2018), and the forthcoming Poetics and Politics of Literary Nonsense. She (co)edited ten essay collections including Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales (2011), Posthumanism in Fantastic Fiction (2018), The Fairy-Tale Vanguard (with Stijn Praet, 2019), and Transmediating and Translating Children’s Literature (with Björn Sundmark, 2020). She is the editor of the scholarly e-journal (Mesecentrum Tanulmányok) of IGYIC The Hungarian Centre for Children’s and Youth Literature.


    Yasmine Motawy, PhD is a scholar, translator, educator, critic, consultant, and editor who has published extensively on Arab children’s literature. She served on the 2021 Bologna Ragazzi Award Jury, the 2016 and 2018 Hans Christian Andersen Award Jury, the 2017 Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature jury, and on the Arabic selection committee of the UN SDG Book Club (2019-2020). She was on the board of Egyptian Board on Books for Young People (2012-2018) and received the Andrew Mellon Foundation postdoctoral grant in 2018. She authored Silence Between the Waves: Children’s Picturebooks and Contemporary Egyptian Society in 2021. In 2022, she was awarded the Excellence in Research and Creative Endeavors Award from AUC for having a distinguished record of nationally and internationally visible research. In addition to children’s literature, Yasmine is also interested in writing for social justice, humor in media, service learning, community based writing, teaching children’s writing, life narratives, and the creative writing process.


    Philip Nel is University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University. He is the author or co-editor of thirteen books, including: Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (2017), four volumes of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby (co-edited with Eric Reynolds, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2020), a double biography of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss (2012), Keywords for Children’s Literature (2nd edition co-edited with Lissa Paul and Nina Christensen, 2021), and Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (co-edited with Julia Mickenberg, 2008).

    Sara Pankenier Weld is a Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who researches children’s literature and childhood across national and interdisciplinary boundaries, particularly in Slavic, Scandinavian, and North American contexts. Her first book Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde (Northwestern, 2014), an interdisciplinary study of Russian literature, art, and theory, received the IRSCL Book Award in 2015 and was recently published in Russian translation (Bibliorossica, Academic Studies Press, 2023). Sara's second book, An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebooks (John Benjamins, 2018), offers a close analysis of image and text in little-known picturebooks by prominent Russian writers, artists, and intellectuals. Her current book project is entitled Miniature Revelations: Childhood in Nabokov's Writings. In summer 2019, Sara was a Stipendiat at the International Youth Library in Germany. Sara is faculty convenor of the Global Childhood Ecologies Research Focus Group, since 2022. In 2023 Sara was elected President of the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL), after serving on the IRSCL Executive Board Member from 2019-2021 as Awards and Grants Coordinator and from 2021-2023 as Convenor of the 2023 IRSCL Congress. She previously served as Executive Officer of the ASEEES Childhood in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia (ChEEER) working group, from 2013-2019.

    Krzysztof Rybak is a research assistant at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw, Poland. He is a member of the European Children's Literature Research Network and 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. In his Ph.D. he analysed narrative strategies in contemporary Polish children’s literature on the Holocaust (within a research project “Oczami dziecka”), but 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.”


    Dr. Iris Schäfer is research assistant at the Institute of Children’s and Young Adult Literature Research at Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main. She studied Comparative and German Literature in Frankfurt and London. In her dissertation: "Von der Hysterie zur Magersucht: Adoleszenz und Krankheit in Romanen und Erzählungen der Jahrhundert- und der Jahrtausendwende" (2015), she examined representations of illness in historical and contemporary YA Literature. Since then, she has worked on an edition project on Lou Andreas-Salomé’s YA Literature, focused on the narrated dream and is currently working on narrated fashion in children’s media. 

    Mateusz Świetlicki (twitter: drswietlicki) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wrocław’s Institute of English Studies (Poland), Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture, and Deputy Dean for Student Affairs at the Faculty of Letters. His most-recent book, "Next-Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children’s Historical Fiction: The Seeds of Memory" (Routledge, 2023), examines the transnational entanglements of Canada and Ukraine. He has recently co-edited "Navigating Children’s Literature through Controversy: Global and Transnational Perspectives" (Brill, 2023 - with Elżbieta Jamróz-Stolarska and Agata Zarzycka) and a special issue of "Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature" titled "War and Displacement in Children's Literature" (2023 - with Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang). Świetlicki was a Research Scholar at the University of Florida’s Department of English (Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship), a Fulbright scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2018), a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto (2022), and has held multiple other fellowships (Munich, Kyiv, Harvard). He is the deputy editor-in-chief of "Filoteknos," a member of the editorial team of John Benjamins Publishing’s “Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition” series, and a representative of the Childhood & Youth Network of the Social Science History Association.

    Pádraic Whyte is associate professor in children’s literature, Director of Research, and a director of the Children’s Literature MPhil programme at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He recently received a Fulbright Scholar Award to spend Spring 2024 at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa researching the relationship between Ireland and Hawai’i in terms of storytelling, islands, and identities in children’s literature. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of The Ark – a cultural centre for children – and has worked as an advisor with the Dutch Research Council. He lectures on a range of topics at undergraduate and postgraduate level including genders and sexualities in children's literature; myth; the city and children’s literature; and children’s book collections.

    Recent publications include his co-edited collection, The Writings of Padraic Colum: ‘That Queer Thing, Genius’ (Routledge, 2023) and ‘Beyond Traditional Hierarchies: Creating Space for Children’s Literature Collections’ (with Keith O’Sullivan), in Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung (GKJF) (2022). He is co-editor of Children’s Literature Collections: Approaches to Research (Palgrave, 2017) which won the International Research Society for Children's Literature Edited Book Award, 2019.

    Els Beerten studied Dutch and English at KU Leuven while simultaneously pursuing a teaching degree at the same university. She later spent several years in day school at the Toneelacademie in Maastricht. Her debut work, Scènes (Scenes) (DF-Infodok), was published in 1987. Her latest novel, De rest van ons leven (‘The Rest of Our Lives') (Querido), has been available in bookstores since March 2022. Her books have received several awards and have been translated into multiple languages. She was Writer in Residence in Paramaribo (2005), Ledig House in New York (2013), and the National Centre for Writing in Norwich (2022). In addition to being a writer, she is also a teacher. For many years, she taught Dutch, English, Creative Writing and Drama. As a creative writing teacher, she worked for several years in South Africa as part of the 'Vingeroefeningen' project (a storytelling course for young people from diverse cultures, commissioned by the King Baudouin Foundation). In Suriname, she conducted workshops in Creative Writing at the Institute for Teacher Training (IOL) and was a guest lecturer at the Schrijversvakschool in Paramaribo for several years. Since 2018, she has been offering an annual evening course in Creative Writing at CC Het Gasthuis.