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.
Vanessa Joosen is 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, ALA Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Publication), and co-editor of Grimm’s Tales Around the Globe (2014, with Gillian Lathey, ChLA Honour Award for edited book). Joosen’s 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 monographs Adulthood in Children’s Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Age in David Almond’s Oeuvre (Routledge, 2023). From 2018-2024, she led the ERC-funded project Constructing Age for Young Readers (CAFYR).
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 Poetics and Politics of Literary Nonsense (2024). She (co)edited fourteen 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 has been the editor of the scholarly e-journal (Mesecentrum Tanulmányok) of IGYIC The Hungarian Centre for Children’s and Youth Literature and recently co-edited Bookbird’s 2025/3 issue with a spotlight on contemporary Hungarian children’s literature.
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 proud veteran of the Children's Literature Summer School: he was a student in the first couple of editions and has been teaching there for some years now, focusing on his main research interests, picturebooks and children's nonfiction. He fell in love with the University of Antwerp and Flemish picturebooks right away. Since finishing his PhD in 2023, he has been an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw (Poland), where he teaches mainly liberal arts students, offering courses on children's literature, audiovisual culture for young audiences, and childhood studies, among others. Krzysztof is a co-initiator of "Grow" (with Rosalyn Borst and Chiara Malpezzi), an initiative that aims to stimulate transnational dialogue and collaboration among young scholars of children’s literature. He reviews children's books for the Polish online weekly "Kultura Liberalna" and has also served on the jury of children's book and film competitions in Poland. A regular visitor to the International Youth Library in Munich, Krzysztof never misses a chance to promote the IYL fellowship programme.
Anna Stemmann (she/her) is a professor of modern German literature, specializing in children's literature, at the University of Leipzig (Germany). She studied German and art. In her doctoral dissertation, she examined spatial constructions in German coming-of-age novels. She conducts research and teaches on contemporary children's literature, comics, intermediality, gender studies, and queer studies.
Lucy Stone