Cristina Aliagas, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain

Dr. Cristina Aliagas is a Juan de la Cierva Research fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. Her doctoral thesis, “El desinterès lector adolescent” [“The adolescent lack of interest in reading”] carried out an anthropological analysis of the literacy practices and the reading identities of four resistant adolescent readers. Her research interests encompass ethnography, vernacular literacies, and digital literacies. She is interested in youth and children’s literacy practices in home, community, and classroom settings, including digital reading and literary reading. Within this broad area, her publications cover a variety of topics: the role of families in supporting children’s digital literacies, the interface between technology and education, formal and informal ways of literacy and literary learning, and the role of digital literacies in curriculum innovation and change. She has been a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sheffield (UK, 2012-2014) and at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (Spain, 2011-2013; 2015-2016), and she has published more than fifty research papers in the field. She is a Spanish co-coordinator of the COST Actiu Project “The digital literacy and multimodal practices of young children” (DigiLiTEY).

Marc Aronson, Rutgers University, USA

Dr. Marc Aronson has worked in the field of literature for younger readers for more than thirty years as an author, editor, speaker, publisher, and critic. He is the author of Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado and the winner of the inaugural Robert F. Sibert Medal for most distinguished informational book for children through age fourteen.

Limin Bai, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Dr. Limin Bai is senior lecturer in Chinese Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She has published extensively in both English and Chinese on Chinese history, society, and education. Among her publications is Shaping the Ideal Child: Children and Their Primers in Late Imperial China (Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 2005).

Betsy Bird, Evanston Public Library, USA

Betsy Bird is the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library in Illinois, and the former Youth Materials Specialist of New York Public Library. She reviews for Kirkus, served on the 2007 Newbery Award committee, and writes a children’s literature blog, A Fuse #8 Production, hosted by School Library Journal. She is the co-author on the nonfiction book Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature (Candlewick, 2014) which she wrote with fellow bloggers Julie Danielson and Peter Sieruta.

Chien-Ju Chang, National Taiwan Normal University

Professor Chang teaches in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at National Taiwan Normal University. Her research interests include children’s language acquisition, literacy development, and child development. She is the author of eight monographs and twenty-nine academic papers.

Minjie Chen, Princeton University, USA

Dr. Chen works with non-Roman materials at the Cotsen Children’s Library. The author of The Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature: Friends and Foes on the Battlefield (Routledge, 2016), Chen studies children’s literature as a source of information for young readers.

Shih-Wen Sue Chen, Deakin University, Australia

Dr. Shih-Wen Sue Chen is a Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. In 2017, she was a National Library of Australia Fellow, completing her book manuscript Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in China (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan). She is an elected board member of the Australasian Children’s Literature Association for Research (2016-2018). Prior to joining Deakin, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World. She is the author of Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851-1911 (Hardback, Ashgate, 2013; Paperback, Routledge, 2016), which was nominated for the International Research Society for Children’s Literature Book Award in 2015.

Shiming Chen, Xiamen City University, China

Professor Chen is a council member of The Chinese Society for the Studies of Children’s Literature, chairwoman of Fujianese-Taiwanese Children’s Literature Research Institute, and a Master Teacher of Fujian province. Her research focuses on children’s literature, children’s language and literature education, and drama education. Her monograph, Early Childhood Reading in the Visual Era, won the first prize of the National Educational Research Awards. Her work, Multiple Perspectives on Children’s Play, won second prize at the Fujian Province Eleventh Social Science Achievement Award.

Xiru Du, Penn State University, USA

Xiru Du is currently a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Instruction Department at Penn State University, where she teaches courses in children’s literature, both online and in-person. Her research interests include cross-media and cross-cultural adaptations of children’s literature.

Yawen Fan, Ocean University of China

Fan is a graduate student at the College of Foreign Languages at the Ocean University of China. Her research interest is children’s literature and its translation.

Natasha Heller, University of Virginia, USA

Professor Natasha Heller studies Chinese Buddhism in the context of cultural and intellectual history. Her research includes both the pre-modern (10th through 14th century) and contemporary periods.

Chia-Hui Hsing, USA and Taiwan

Dr. Hsing earned her first MA in Fine Arts from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. She earned her second MA from the University of Surrey, UK, and her PhD in children’s literature from Newcastle University, UK. She is an author of picture books, YA novels, biographies, and introductions to children’s literature. She is a frequent recipient of the Golden Tripod Award and National Culture and Arts Foundation grants. She established an association in Tainan to promote children’s reading in 2011. She has been lecturing on children’s literature and reading to the public and in academic institutions in Taiwan. Dr. Hsing lives in the USA.

Andrea Immel, Princeton University, USA

Dr. Immel is the Curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of English at University of California, Los Angeles, with a specialization in eighteenth-century English Literature. Her latest publications include Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature: From the Enlightenment to the Present Day (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) co-edited with Emer O’Sullivan; and The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2009) co-edited with M.O. Grenby.

Sin Wen Lau, University of Otago, New Zealand

Professor Sin Wen Lau is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago. She is a sociocultural anthropologist with research interests in religion, gender, diaspora, children and youth in the context of China. She is the co-editor of Religion and Mobility in a Globalising Asia: New Ethnographic Explorations (Routledge, 2014). Her work has been published in The Asian Studies Review, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, and The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Lifang Li, Lanzhou University, China

Professor Li is the Dean of the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Lanzhou University. She is a member of the Committee on Children’s Literature of the China Writers Association (CWA), the Education Steering Committee of the Master in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages program (MTCSOL), and the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL). She has studied children’s literature for over two decades and has published over fifty academic papers. She is recognized as an important emerging voice in the field of theory and criticism of children’s literature in China.

Tara M. McGowan, Princeton University, USA

Dr. Tara McGowan is a professional storyteller, Japan scholar, and visual artist who has performed kamishibai stories at festivals in Japan and in the US for over a decade. She conducts kamishibai workshops in schools, libraries, and museums, and in 2010 she published The Kamishibai Classroom: Engaging Multiple Literacies through the Art of ‘Paper Theater’ (ABC-CLIO). She received her doctorate in literacy and education at the University of Pennsylvania and published her research in 2015 under the title Performing Kamishibai: An Emerging New Literacy for a Global Audience (Routledge). She has presented about kamishibai at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the International Reading Association (IRA), and the Literacy Research Association (LRA).

Anne Morey, Texas A&M University, USA

Professor Anne Morey is an associate professor in English at Texas A&M University. Her book Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913-1934 deals with Hollywood’s critics and co-opters. She has published in Film History, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Framework, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among others. She has published an anthology on Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” phenomenon (Ashgate 2012), and is currently co-authoring a volume with Claudia Nelson on the reuses of the ancient world in contemporary children’s literature. She is also writing a monograph on the Junior Literary Guild, a 1920s-1950s children’s book club. She is associate editor of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.

Claudia Nelson, Texas A&M University, USA

Professor Claudia Nelson is the author of five monographs, the co-editor of four essay collections, the general editor of British Family Life, 1780-1914 (5 vols.), and the editor of a critical edition of E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers and The Wouldbegoods. She is a former president of the Children’s Literature Association and the current editor of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, as well as a founding organizer of the China-US Children’s Literature Symposium.

Aiping Nie, Northeast Normal University, China

Dr. Nie is an Associate Professor at the School of Foreign Languages at Northeast Normal University. Her field of research is children’s literature, with a focus on fantasy literature.

Tongwei Qi, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China

Dr. Qi is a lecturer in the School of Humanities at Hangzhou Dianzi University and a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Arts at Southeast University, China. He has a doctoral degree in Chinese Modern and Contemporary Literature. Dr Qi is the author of the book Chinese Children’s Fiction in the 1980s. His articles have appeared in International Research in Children’s Literature and Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature.

Dana Sheridan, Princeton University, USA

Dr. Dana Sheridan received her Ph.D. and M.Ed. in Educational Psychology from the University of Virginia. While her academic career focused on how children learn in free-choice environments, her professional passion has always been the design of dynamic hands-on programs and presentations for children. Dr. Sheridan has been a guest lecturer at literary societies, children’s literature classes, and education courses. Additionally, she has served as a consultant for children’s programs and exhibitions developed by institutions including the University of Virginia’s Children’s Hospital, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, the National Park Service, the Princeton Center for Complex Materials, the Historical Society of Princeton, and the Philadelphia Zoo. She blogs about her creative programs and projects at Pop Goes the Page.

Angela Sorby, Marquette University, USA

Angela Sorby is a Professor of English at Marquette University. She has published a critical study, Schoolroom Poets (UPNE, 2005); three poetry collections, Distance Learning (New Issues, 1998), Bird Skin Coat (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), and The Sleeve Waves (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014); and an anthology, Over the River and Through the Wood (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), co-edited with Karen Kilcup. She has also written many articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century children’s and popular culture.

Deborah Stevenson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Dr. Deborah Stevenson is the editor of the review journal the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books and the director of the Center for Children’s Books at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has taught children’s literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Simmons College, and Indiana University Northwest. Her articles have appeared in the Horn Book Magazine, The Lion and the Unicorn, and the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. She was a senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature and a contributor to the Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature, and she is a co-editor with Karen Coats of the forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Children’s Literature. Her research ranges from the demographics of youth literature, to book importation and translation, to STEM-based library programming for young people.

Camila Zorrilla Tessler, Yale University, USA

Camila Zorrilla Tessler is an archivist at Yale University in the Manuscripts and Archives department. Her research interests include the mainstreaming and politicization of children’s literature and media, particularly through art.

Helen Wang, British Museum, UK

Dr. Helen Wang translates Chinese literature for children and young adults. She has translated novels by Cao Wenxuan, Shen Shixi, Lin Man-Chiu; a graphic novel by Zhang Xinxin; and picture books. Her translation of Cao Wenxuan’s Bronze and Sunflower won the 2017 Marsh Christian Award for Children’s Literature in Translation. It has also been shortlisted for the 2017 Kirkus Prize, and nominated for the 2018 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults. In 2016 she co-founded the web resource Chinese Books for Young Readers with Minjie Chen and Anna Gustafsson Chen. When she is not translating fiction, she is Curator of East Asian Money at the British Museum.

Qiuying Lydia Wang, Oklahoma State University, USA

Professor Wang takes cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparative perspectives on literacy education. A quantitative researcher, she mainly focuses on the language and literacy development of English Language Learners (ELLs), Chinese-speaking children, English-speaking children, and bilingual children. She has studied the visual, phonological, morphological, and orthographical processes in vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension in these populations as well as a cross-linguistic comparison of the cognitive deficits underlying reading disabilities. She has also investigated effective early intervention for non-alphabetic language speakers. Dr. Wang is the Director of the Randall and Carol White Reading and Math Center in which undergraduate and graduate literacy students provide low-cost tutoring to children.

Frances Weightman, University of Leeds, UK

Dr. Frances Weightman is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. She runs the AHRC-funded Writing Chinese project (https://writingchinese.leeds.ac.uk), a research network designed to bring together academic and non-academic partners with interests in contemporary Chinese literature and its translation into English, and to help promote new writing from China in the West. Her research interests extend to Chinese fiction of all time periods, and she is the author of The Quest for the Childlike in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction: Fantasy, Naivety, and Folly.

Derong Xu, Ocean University of China

Mr. Xu is an Associate Professor and PhD candidate of the Ocean University of China, a council member of The Chinese Society for the Studies of Children’s Literature, and a member of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL). He was a visiting scholar at the University of Reading, UK from February 2016 to February 2017. His research focuses on children’s literature and its translation. He has published more than twenty papers in Chinese core journals, including China Translators Journal, Foreign Literature Research, and Foreign Languages Research. He is the author of the book Child-Oriented Translation Studies and Literary Criticism (2017).

Yan Xu, Ocean University of China

Professor Xu teaches at the College of Liberal Arts, Journalism and Communication at the Ocean University of China. She is a council member of China’s LU Xun Research Society and the Chinese Society for the Studies of Children’s Literature, and vice chairwoman of the Qingdao Literary and Art Criticism Association. Her research areas include Chinese modern and contemporary literature, LU Xun studies, and children’s literature.

Ning Yang, Gannan Normal University, China

Ning Yang is a visiting scholar at Marquette University.

Chengcheng You, Jinan University, China

Dr. You is a lecturer of the Department of Translation Studies at Jinan University, China. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Macau. Her research interests include the poetics of anthropomorphism, adaptations of Chinese classics, and adolescent gothic literature. Her recent publications include chapters in Child Governance and Child Autonomy in Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2016) and New Directions in Gothic Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2017), as well as forthcoming articles in the journals Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, Children’s Literature in Education (online in May 2017), Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, and International Research in Children’s Literature. Her co-authored monograph on the poetics and ethics of anthropomorphism is now under contract with Routledge.

Wei Zheng, Fujian Early Childhood Education College, China

Professor Zheng is director of the Research Center for Children’s Literature Across the Taiwan Straits, a council member of the Chinese Society for the Studies of Children’s Literature, and a council member of Children’s Literature Society for Chinese Normal Schools. His research areas include children’s literature, and the teaching and research of children’s culture. Committed to combining teaching, research, and social services, he trained volunteers to promote children’s reading in public libraries. He is author of Books That Construct Childhood (2015) and has published more than thirty reviews and papers in scholarly journals.

Junnan Zhou, National Taiwan Normal University

Zhou is a PhD student under the supervision of Professor Chien-Ju Chang in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at National Taiwan Normal University. Her research focuses on children’s reading and children’s literature. She has published five papers in academic journals, including the Journal of Shaoyang University and the Journal of Zunyi Normal University.

Ziqiang Zhu, Ocean University of China

Professor Zhu is a scholar, translator, and writer. He is Vice Chairman of The Chinese Society for the Studies of Children’s Literature, and director of the Institute of Children’s Literature at Ocean University of China. His research areas include children’s literature, Chinese language education, and children’s education. He has published The Collected Scholarly Works of Zhu Ziqiang (in ten volumes). His monographs on the theory of children’s literature include The Essence of Children’s Literature and Introduction to Children’s Literature. His scholarship on the history of children’s literature was published in Chinese Children’s Literature and Modernization and Japanese Children’s Literature, among many other books. He has won The Jiang Feng Children’s Literature Theoretical Research Award and was nominated for the Lu Xun Literary Criticism Award.