Conference Speakers
Keynote Address
Paula Fass
Paula S. Fass is the Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is Children of a New World: Essays in Society, Culture, and the World (New York University Press, 2007). Paula is the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (Macmillan Reference, 2004), an award-winning three-volume reference work. With Mary Ann Mason, she edited the sourcebook Childhood in America (New York University Press, 2000). She has also written three other books, Kidnapped: Child Abduction in American History (Oxford University Press, 1997), Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (Oxford University Press, 1989) and The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's (Oxford University Press, 1977). She is the president of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars working with children and youth studies, and she works actively to promote the cause of childhood and youth studies as a global discipline.
Panel 1: Intersecting Canons
Anne Lundin
Anne Lundin is Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of
Library and Information Studies, where she teaches courses in Children's
Literature, Storytelling, and Youth Services in Libraries. She is the
author of Constructing the Canon of Children’s Literature: Beyond Library
Walls and Ivory Towers (Routledge 2004), which is part of Jack Zipes's
"Children's Literature and Culture" series. Straddling disciplines of
literature and librarianship, her work explores issues of reception and
canonization in the cultural formation of the field of children's
literature.
paper: "The Spider's Web: Children's Books into Children's Literature"
Maria Cecire
Maria Cecire is a DPhil candidate in English Literature at the University
of Oxford, where she focuses on twentieth century children's fantasy and
its intersections with medieval literature. She is the author of an
article on Harry Potter and the poetics of paranoia in the Oxford School
of children’s literature, forthcoming in the Journal of Children's
Literature Studies. She has also written a chapter on gender and aging in
Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle for
Narratives of Old Age, a collection of critical essays on aging to be
published in 2008. She is also a 2006 Rhodes Scholar.
paper: "The Oxford School of Children’s Literature"
Martha Stoddard Holmes
Martha Stoddard Holmes is Associate Professor of Literature and Writing
Studies at the California State University, San Marcos. She researches
and writes on the cultural history of the body from Victorian culture to
the present, with special interests in the public and private cultures of
affect with regard to disability; the cultural history of bodily
enhancements; and (more recently) the public culture of cancer, including
cancer comics. She has also been teaching children’s literature into film
and children’s literature and culture since 2003. Martha Stoddard Holmes
is also the author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in
Victorian Culture (U Michigan Press) 2004, and coeditor of The Teacher’s
Body: Embodiment, Authority, and Identity in the Classroom (SUNY Press)
2003.
paper: "Peter Pan and 'Children's Literature'"
Sharon K. Goetz, panel moderator
Sharon K. Goetz is Associate Editor and Acting Digital Publications
Manager for the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
Panel 2: Children’s Literature and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico
Beatríz Alcubierre Moya and Rodrigo Bazán Bonfil
Beatríz Alcubierre Moya is professor of history in the School of Humanities at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Mexico. She is the author of Los niños villistas: una mirada a la historia de la infancia en México (The Children of Villa: An Overview of the History of Childhood in México, 1900-1920), published by the Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana in 1996. She is also the author of a forthcoming monograph titled Ciudadanos del futuro: publicaciones para niños en el siglo XIX mexicano (Citizens of the Future: Children’s Books and Magazines in Nineteenth Century Mexico). Her research interests include the history of childhood in Mexico and the history of the book.
Rodrigo Bazán Bonfil is professor of literature in the School of Humanities at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Mexico. He is the author of Y si vivo cien años: antología del bolero en México (If I Live a Hundred Years: An Anthology of Bolero in Mexico), published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in 2001. He is a specialist in medieval and Golden Century Hispanic literatures. His other research interests include oral and popular culture and technologies of transmission. paper: "José Vasconcelos's Lecturas clásicas para niños and the Making of Childhood in Post-Revolutionary Mexico"
Elena Jackson Albarrán
Elena Jackson Albarrán will graduate this spring from the University of
Arizona with a doctorate in History. Her areas of interest are Modern
Mexico and childhood. Her dissertation explores the cultural context in
which a generation of Mexicans grew up in the decades 1920-1940 after the
Mexican Revolution, and draws from many child-produced documents and
sources. Starting in the fall, she will be a professor of Latin American
Studies and History at Miami University of Ohio.
paper: "Pulgarcito: Mexico's Nationalist Art Program Magazine for
Children, 1925-1932"
Marcelle Maese-Cohen, panel moderator
Marcelle Maese-Cohen is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at UC Berkeley.
Panel 3: Transnationalism, Imperialism, Identity
Emilie Bergmann
Emilie Bergmann is Professor of Spanish at U.C. Berkeley. She has
published on representations of childhood in Cervantes and motherhood in
early modern conduct manuals and twentieth-century Spanish literature, and
is co-editor of two volumes of essays published in 2007: Approaches to
Teaching Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (MLA) and Mirrors and Echoes: Women's
Writing in Twentieth-Century Spain, co-editor with Richard Herr,
University of California Press.
paper: "Revisiting the Snow Queen in Spain"
Tiffney Mortensen
Tiffney Mortensen is completing her thesis for an MA in English
Literature at Cal State Northridge. A native of La Crescenta, California,
her main academic interests are medieval literature, children's
literature, and digital culture.
paper: "Adult Imperialism in Children’s Moral Development"
Monia Hejaiej
Monia Hejaiej, originally from Tunis, Tunisia, holds a Ph.D from the University of London and an MA from the University of Tunis. She is the author of Behind Closed Doors: Women's Oral Narratives in Tunis (Rutgers, 1996) and several academic articles on English and world literature. She teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. Her current projects include a second book and an anthology of children's literature in the Arab World.
paper: "New Mythical Heroes of the Muslim Arab World"
Aaron Bady
Aaron Bady is a doctoral candidate here at UC Berkeley. His dissertation seeks to place literary writing in and about Africa within the larger project of political modernization in late colonial and early independence Africa, exploring in particular how W.E.B. DuBois and the New Negro served as model for both African writers and politicians. The project began with the discovery that so many of the first leaders of independent African nations were also their first prominent poet, anthropologist, novelist, etc, and the paper he is going to give is part of that larger project. But he's not sure exactly how, just yet.
paper: "Black Boys and Learning to Be One: The Politics of Pedagogy and African 'Boy' Novels"
Christine Hong, panel moderator
Christine Hong is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley.
Panel 4: Emerging Canons
Rebecca Fraimow
Rebecca Fraimow is completing her bachelor's degree in English at Stanford University, where she is writing a thesis on the intersection of young adult fiction and medieval romance.
paper: "First Blood: Coming of Age for the Cross-Dressed Heroine in YA Literature"
Amelia Brown
Amelia Brown will graduate from California State University, San Marcos in
May with an M.A. in Literature and Writing. Her academic interests are
Children's Literature and Disability.
paper: "A Mouse and a Swan: Two Disabled Heroes of Canonical Children's
Literature"
Johanna Koljonen
Johanna Koljonen was working as a writer, film critic and television presenter in Sweden and her native Finland when she was struck by the realization that watching bad films for a living might not be as fulfilling at age 50 as it was at 25. This spring she will be leaving Oxford University with a BA in English language and literature, and her mind set on a academic career. All of her research interests are in the field of bad popular culture. She is the author of a manga series, Oblivion High, that will be published in Finland at the end of the month.
paper: "Gossip Girls and Shopping Princesses: Clique Lit and the Book Packager That Created the Genre"
Susan Schweik, panel moderator
Susan Schweik is a professor of English at UC Berkeley.
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