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 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".
Nina Christensen, PhD, Professor in Children’s literature, Head of Center for Children's Literature and Media, Aarhus University. Her research and teaching interest include history of children's and young people's texts and media, children’s reading cultures in contemporary and historical contexts, picturebooks, and the interaction between children's literature and concepts related to childhood. She is co-coordinator of the Erasmus + Master in Children’s Literature, Media and Cultural Entrepreneurship (CLMCE), co-taught by Glasgow University, Tilburg University, Nantes University, University of Wroclaw and Aarhus University, and advisory board member of the scholarly journals International Research in Children's Literature and Barnboken.
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.
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 an assistant professor at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw, Poland, working mainly on children’s literature, informational or non-fiction picturebooks in particular. 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 an International Youth Library in Munich fellowship, which he promotes on every occasion. Between 2024 and 2025, he is supported by the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP).
Mateusz Świetlicki is Associate Professor at the Department of American Literature and Culture and Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture (Institute of English Studies), as well as Vice-Dean for Student Affairs and Extramural Teaching at the Faculty of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (University of Wrocław, Poland). He is the author of more than 100 publications, including Next-Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children’s Historical Fiction: The Seeds of Memory (Routledge, 2023), which won the 2025 International Research Society for Children’s Literature Book Award, and articles published in such journals as Children’s Literature in Education, Children’s Literature Quarterly, and Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. He has recently co-edited Fieldwork in Ukrainian Children’s Literature (with Anastasia Ulanowicz, Routledge, 2025) and Navigating Children’s Literature through Controversy: Global and Transnational Perspectives (with Elżbieta Jamróz-Stolarska and Agata Zarzycka, Brill, 2023). His research interests include historical fiction, memory and trauma studies, liminality, Ukrainian and Polish diasporas, and intersections of popular culture and literature. He is currently working on a book project focused on liminal identities in Polish-themed North American YA historical fiction. 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 and a member of the editorial team of John Benjamins Publishing’s “Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition” series. Świetlicki is a member of various organizations, including IRSCL, and a co-officer of the Childhood in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia Working Group of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
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 in Brussels, and co-teaches the MA courses 'Literature and Education' and 'Comics and Graphic Novels' at Ghent University. She is an FWO postdoctoral researcher, located at the Universities of Ghent and Antwerp. Her current project 'Reading Mickey' studies European Mickey Mouse magazines between the 1930s and 1960s. For that transnational project, she is editing a special issue of Studies in Comics on Disney Comics across the Globe with dr. Katja Konturri. 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).
Shih-Wen Sue Chen (PhD, Australian National University) is an Associate Professor in Writing and Literature and co-convenor of the Asian Media, Culture & Society Research Group at Deakin University, Australia. She is the author of Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China: Education, Religion, and Childhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 (Routledge, 2013) and the co-editor of Representations of Children and Success in Asia: Dream Chasers (Routledge, 2022). With Kristine Moruzi, she co-edits the journal Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, the official scholarly publication of the Australasian Children’s Literature Association for Research. Her research areas include transnational children’s literature, historical children’s literature, children’s media and print culture, and book history. She is currently working on a research project on science in nineteenth-century children’s literature.
Laura Watkinson loves reading and translating children’s and YA literature and has worked as a literary translator for over twenty years. She has translated all kinds of books for younger readers, from fun picture books to Young Adult thrillers, and has worked with publishers all over the world. She translates into English, mainly from Dutch and also from German, Italian and Frisian. Two of her career highlights have been visiting the filming locations for the Netflix series of The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt, which she translated for Pushkin Press, and the shortlisting of her translation of Annet Schaap’s Lampie (also Pushkin Press) for the Carnegie Medal in 2020, the first translated book to be nominated for the award since it was established in 1936. Three of her translated books have won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award: Bibi Dumon Tak’s Mikis and the Donkey and Soldier Bear (both Eerdmans) and Truus Matti’s Mister Orange (Enchanted Lion). Two of her most recent projects are Annet Schaap's Cricket (Pushkin Press) and After Party by Maren Stoffels (Penguin Random House). Laura lives in a tall, thin house on a canal in Amsterdam with her husband, her cat, and lots of shelves of lovely books.
Courtney Weikle-Mills is Associate Professor and Director of the Children’s Literature Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868 (2013), which won the ChLA’s Honor Book Award, and Sugarcoated Ethics: Children’s Literature and Atlantic Enslavement (forthcoming 2026). Her most recent essay, “Book Publishing and the British Sphere of Influence in the 18th and 19th Centuries” appeared in Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture. Her work can also be found in Children's Literature, Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children's Literature Before 1900, The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature, Early American Literature, and American Periodicals. She is the creator of a collaborative digital project with Sreemoyee Dasgupta and Gabriela Lee called Round the Globe: Travel Routes of Children's Literature, which tracks the spread and influence of children’s books in the first two-hundred years following the European development of printed books for youth, showing the impact of global trade, colonization, evangelism, and struggles for independence. She is working on a new project on pacifism in children's literature.
XU Derong, PhD, professor of English language and literature at Ocean University of China, member of Advisory Editorial Board for IRCL, Vice Chair of China and Foreign Children’s Literature Research Branch of China Comparative Research Society, and board member of China Children’s Literature Research Society. His research interests are children’s literature criticism and translation. He has published more than 70 academic papers and four monographs on children’s literature and its translation, including Child-oriented Literature Criticism and Translation Studies in 2017, A Stylistic Approach to the Translation of Children’s Literature in 2020 and The Overseas Translation and Reception of Chinese Children’s Literature in 2025. He has translated more than 80 children’s books.