Research Positions at Children's Book Project in Dublin

See the details below for information about two Post Doctoral Research positions and one Research Assistant position available for a major children's book project in Dublin, Ireland.

Post Title: Postdoctoral Researcher, The National Collection of Children’s Books Project x 2 (Trinity College Dublin and the Church of Ireland College of Education)
Post Status: 22-month contract, Full-time
Department/Faculty: School of English, Trinity College Dublin
Location: School of English
Salary: €40,885 per annum
Closing Date: 12 Noon on Thursday, 9th January 2014
Contact email: whytepa@tcd.ie

Post Summary:
This collaborative project between the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and the Church of Ireland College of Education will detail the content of named collections (while also referring to print and archival materials) in Trinity College, the National Library of Ireland, The Church of Ireland College of Education, St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra (DCU), Pearse Street Library and others.

Applications are invited for two postdoctoral research positions as part of a two-year interdisciplinary and inter-institutional project, funded by the Irish Research Council, which will examine children’s book collections, in the English language, in the city of Dublin. The project, which will establish Dublin as the world-centre for children’s literature research, also represents the beginning of The National Collection of Children’s Books. The project is also supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub. The successful candidates will be expected to take up the posts on 1 February 2014.

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Post Title: Research Assistant, The National Collection of Children’s Books Project (Trinity College Dublin and the Church of Ireland College of Education)
Post Status: 22-month Specific Purpose Contract, Full-time
Department/Faculty: School of English, Trinity College Dublin
Location: School of English (and libraries and institutions listed below)
Reports: Dr Pádraic Whyte (TCD) and Dr Keith O’Sullivan (CICE) – Principal Investigators
Salary: €25,712 per annum
Closing Date: 12 Noon on Thursday, 9th January 2014
Contact email: nccb@tcd.ie

Post Summary
This collaborative project between the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and the Church of Ireland College of Education will detail the content of named collections (while also referring to print and archival materials) in Trinity College, the National Library of Ireland, The Church of Ireland College of Education, St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra (DCU), Pearse Street Library and others.

Applications are invited for a research assistant as part of a two-year interdisciplinary and inter-institutional project, funded by the Irish Research Council, which will examine children’s book collections, in the English language, in the city of Dublin. The project, which will establish Dublin as the world-centre for children’s literature research, also represents the beginning of The National Collection of Children’s Books. The project is also supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub. The successful candidate will be expected to take up the post on 1 February 2014.


For further details and to apply for a position, please access this link: https://jobs.tcd.ie/

Highlights on Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week is underway around the country (Sept 30 - Oct 6), celebrating its 30th year of challenging literary censorship. To get you up to speed on the most challenged books of the last year (including The Hunger Games, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, and To Kill a Mockingbird), Huffington Post put up an informative infographic breaking down the categories under which the Top Ten most banned books fall.The graphic also displays the number of challenges made over the past twenty years, a useful tool in examining the changing trends.

Check out Publisher Weekly's Banned Books Week at 30: New and Notable Efforts to learn details about some of the events and efforts being held across the nation.

Locally, the San Diego Public Library is holding an All-Day Read-Aloud Reading Marathon on Thursday October 4th at the Central Branch. It's being held in conjunction with their months long library project, Searching for Democracy: A Public Conversation about the Constitution sponsored by Cal Humanities. Check out their site for details and more events: http://www.sandiego.gov/public-library/news-events/index.shtml.

Lastly, we share an essay by Ray Bradbury, taken from the Introduction to The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, which highlights his own adventure of falling in love with books:

"I asked big questions because of books. I dreamed because of books. I started to write because of books. I read everything from comic strips, to history books, to the fantastic tales of L. Frank Baum, Edgar Allen Poe, H.G. Wells, and many others. None of this reading was required, mind you. I just did it."

The essay can be found here.
Find more information on Banned Books Week on their website: http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/

Access to the New Review of Chlidren's Literature and Librarianship

The New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship is excited to offer FREE access to an article from its recent archives 18(1): "Evolving Tools for Information Literacy from Models of Information Behavior" by Andrew K. Shenton and Naomi V. Hay-Gibson.

The New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship has established itself as one of the leading publications for the exchange of ideas and the sharing of experiences in the provision of literature for children and young people. The journal is multidisciplinary in nature, providing opportunities for the 'pure' discussion of children's literature, and of issues relating to libraries for young people.

The journal fosters the sharing of ideas between those who study children's literature, and those who provide it. The New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship welcomes articles covering:

    * Management of library services to children and adolescents
    * Education issues affecting library services
    * User education and the promotion of services
    * Staff education and training
    * Collection development and management
    * Critical assessments of children's and adolescent literature
    * Book and media selection
    * Research in literature and library services for children and adolescents

For more information about the New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship, please visit the journal's webpage: www.tandfonline.com/RCLL

Editor
Dr. Sally Maynard
Loughborough University

Publication Details
Volume 18, 2012
2 issues per year
Print ISSN 1361-4541
Online ISSN 1740-7885

Internatl. Research Society for Children's Literature CFP

Call for papers

The 21^st biennial conference of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature on

Children’s Literature and Media Cultures

will be hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, The Netherlands

Conference Convenor: Lies Wesseling

Conference dates: August 10-14, 2013

Conference theme:

Contemporary children and adolescents divide their time over many different media. These media do not develop in isolation. Rather, they shape each other by continually exchanging content and modes of mediation. This conference addresses the exchanges between children’s literature and adjacent media (oral narrative, theatre, film, radio, TV, digital media).

Media are best defined as cultural practices that forge specific links between senders and receivers of messages, facilitating certain types of communicative behavior. As newer media tend to imitate, if not absorb, older media, they force older media to reassert their uniqueness and indispensability in a rapidly changing media landscape. How has children’s literature staked out its own niche in these historically variable ‘mediascapes’ in the course of time? How do electronic and digital media affect children’s emergent literacy and literary competence? How have children’s books and the newer electronic and digital media impacted on children’s play? What sort of communicative behaviors are facilitated by the diverse media available to children and adolescents nowadays? Which ethical and political issues are raised by the fact that children’s literature has to share its claim to the audience’s attention with a whole gamut of alternative media? These questions are central to the 21st biannual conference of the IRSCL.

The aim of the conference is to strengthen the ever closer ties between children’s literature scholars and media experts, and to bridge the gap between hermeneutic methods from the humanities and empirical, experimental methods from the social sciences.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Adriana Bus, Gudrun Marci-Boehncke, Jackie Marsh, Kerry Mallan, Junko Yokota

For further information about the conference, the call for papers, and the submission of abstracts, go to: www.irscl2013.com

David Almond Fellowship Winners Announced, reprint

ANNOUNCEMENT
Inaugural David Almond Fellows

In spring 2012 the Children’s Literature Unit in Newcastle
University’s School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
and Seven Stories, the national centre for children’s books announced
the creation of David Almond Fellowships. The Fellowships aim to
promote high-quality research in the Seven Stories collections of a
kind that will call attention to the collections’ breadth and
scholarly potential. The competition closed on 1 June. A strong field
of candidates from scholars at different stages in their careers and
from several countries applied to become the first David Almond
Fellows. Applications were judged on the merit of projects and their
ability to make full use of the Seven Stories collections. The
successful candidates for the 2012 awards are Eve Lacey and Dr. Keith
O’Sullivan.


Eve Lacey read English at King’s College, Cambridge. Since graduating
in 2011 she has completed a research internship at the Fitzwilliam
Museum in Cambridge. Eve reviews for various online journals and
websites. Her research focuses on 'Illustrated Bodies and Traces of
Disability'. Eve plans to look at material relating to David Almond's
Heaven Eyes and Jacqueline Wilson's The Illustrated Mum.


Keith O'Sullivan lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College
of Education in Dublin. He recently co-edited the well-received volume
Irish Children’s Literature: New Perspectives on Contemporary Writing
(Routledge, 2011) and is currently co-editing a volume on Children’s
Literature and New York City, also for Routledge. Keith’s project
will examine some early Philip Pullman materials in the Seven Stories
archives for evidence of iconoclastic subtexts.


Details of the resulting projects will be provided early in 2013 in
tandem with application details for the 2013 round of David Almond
Fellowships.


Further information from Kim.Reynolds@ncl.ac.uk.

Peter Hunt on research resources in children's literature, reprinted with thanks from Oxford Bibliographies on-line

Children's Literature

Peter Hunt

Introduction

The study of children’s literature as an academic discipline has developed since the 1980s from its roots in education and librarianship to its place in departments of literature and childhood studies. Although its practitioners position themselves at different points on the spectrum between “book-oriented” and “child-oriented,” the study is held together by the “presence” of some concept of child and childhood in the texts. The distinctions that apply in other literary systems between “literature” and “popular literature” or “literature” and “nonliterature” are not necessarily useful in this field. Nevertheless, criticism tends to fracture between a liberal-humanist and educationalist view that children’s literature should adhere to and inculcate “traditional” literary and cultural values and a more postmodern and theoretical view that texts for children are part of a complex cultural matrix and should be treated nonjudgmentally. In addition, the discipline is multi- and interdisciplinary as well as multimedia: its theory derives from disciplines such as literature, cultural and ideological studies, history, and psychology, and its applications range from literacy to bibliography. Consequently, children’s literature can be defined and limited in many (sometimes conflicting) ways: one major problem for scholars is that the term children’s is sometimes taken to transcend national and language barriers, thus potentially producing a discipline of unmanageable proportions. As a result, this article is eclectic, but it excludes specialist studies to which children’s books are peripheral or merely instrumental, such as folklore or teaching techniques. Children’s literature is also studied comparatively and internationally, with German and Japanese writing being particularly important. This article confines itself to English-language texts and translations into English.

Reference Resources

The major reference books (Carpenter and Prichard 1984, Watson 2001, Zipes 2006) are designed for the general reader, with succinct entries and extensive illustration. Hunt 2004, Hunt 2006, and Rudd 2010 are aimed at students of children’s literature and provide a basis for the study of the subject (see also Introductions and Guides). For the online resources, a distinction can be made between the academic International Research Society for Children’s Literature and the highly practical International Board on Books for Young People.

• Carpenter, Humphrey, and Mari Prichard. The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

  E-mail Citation »

  Although nontheoretical and increasingly dated, this pioneering work remains an essential text. The more than 2,000 entries cover authors, characters, books, themes, and genres and a selection of national literatures.

• Hunt, Peter, ed. International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. 2d ed. 2 vols. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

  E-mail Citation »

  A two-volume collection of one hundred nineteen 6,000-word essays commissioned from world experts, including Iona Opie, Margaret Meek, Jean Perrot, Perry Nodelman, Hans-Heino Ewers, and Anne Pellowski. The text attempts to cover every aspect of the theory and practice of children’s literature; forty-six of the essays are concerned with the literature of specific countries, continents, or regions.

• Hunt, Peter, ed. Children’s Literature: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. 4 vols. Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

  E-mail Citation »

  The ninety-nine reprinted essays in this four-volume set are the most important critical or theoretical statements about or discussions of virtually all aspects of children’s literature. The set includes work by almost every major critic writing in English; there are twenty sections, the largest being “The Theory Debate.”

• International Board on Books for Young People.

  E-mail Citation »

  Information about contacts in seventy-five countries, devoted to the promotion and distribution of children’s books and to details of the international journal Bookbird.

• International Research Society for Children’s Literature.

  E-mail Citation »

  The IRSCL website contains not only news about the society’s activities, but also information about conferences; calls for papers; a book review section; and links to children’s book collections, documentation centers and libraries, research centers, research societies, and other related sites across the world.

• Rudd, David, ed. The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature. Routledge Companions. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

  E-mail Citation »

  Rudd’s Companion provides an extremely wide-ranging guide to the technical aspects of criticism and theory of children’s literature. The first half comprises eleven long essays on major themes and issues, such as gender, narratology, race, and young adult fiction; the second, an extensive annotated glossary of names and terms, a full bibliography, and a time line.

• Watson, Victor, ed. The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

  E-mail Citation »

  With more than 2,500 entries from more than 200 contributors, this encyclopedic volume covers books and authors that have “made a significant impact on young readers anywhere in the world.” There is particular emphasis on illustrators and on the importance of multimedia texts.

• Zipes, Jack, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. 4 vols. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  E-mail Citation »

  Four-volume general reference work, with particular emphasis on biographies of authors and illustrators.

Thanks to Helen Wang for these resources

Children's fiction in China

By Helen Wang, published March 27, 2012

At last week’s China Fiction Book Club, in London, Nicky brought along two Chinese children’s books that she’s been reviewing: Wu Meizhen’s The Unusual Princess (translated by Petula Parris Huang) and Shen Shixi’s Jackal and Wolf (translated by me).

There are four children’s authors coming to the London Book Fair: Shen Shixi and Wu Meizhen; and Zheng Yuanjie and Yang Hongying. As no biographical information for any of them is provided on the LBF programme, I’ve created author entries for them on Paper Republic.

I also tried to find out more about children’s literature in China. The most authoritative reference I could find was Mary Ann Farquhar’s Children’s Literature in China: from Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (1999). But surely there must be something more recent that covers the 1970s to the 21st century? I’ll put the contents of Farquhar’s book on Resources for Translators, in the hope that others can offer improvements.

At the same time, it is cheering to see that there are many more books for children than there used to be. A few examples:

http://www.cynthialeitichsmith.com/lit_resources/diversity/asian_am/chinese.html
Features and reviews Chinese and Chinese American literature for children.

http://www.asiabookroom.com/AsiaBookRoom/_Children_Teenagers_China_Fiction.html
There is an impressive list of titles (for sale) on this website: picture books for younger children and novels for older readers and young adults. There’s a variety of English language, Chinese language and bilingual Chinese/English.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/?category_id=399796
Has a special section ‘China and Chinese — Children's fiction’ (for sale)

Children's Literature Assoc. conference, links for registration below

ChLA Conference - June 14-16, 2012 - Literary Slipstreams

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Payment Options and Important Date Information

• Registration form must be accompanied by payment in U.S. funds only.
• If you would like to mail or fax your 2012 ChLA Conference registration, please download the ChLA Conference Registration PDF.
• Registration by check/money order:
  Make checks payable to the Children’s Literature Association and mail to the address below.
  ^*Students must submit a copy of current student ID or verification of registration with your registration
• Registration by credit card: Payment will be processed for ChLA by The Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP). Your credit card statement will note a charge was processed by "jhupcirc". Complete the information below and submit by mail to the address below, fax to JHUP at (410) 516-3866, or you may register securely online.
• If you are registering after May 11, 2012, please register online or by fax only. After May 11, a late fee will also be assessed.
• After June 1, 2012, basic registration will be available on site only; no additional conference activities (banquet or tours) may be purchased on site.
• Mail this completed form with payment to:

  Children’s Literature Association
  c/o The Johns Hopkins University Press
  P.O. Box 19966
  Baltimore, MD 21211-0966

Research Resource at Central Michigan University, excerpt

Clarke Historical Library is home to $40 million children’s book collection

By Justin Hicks on March 22, 2012 in Featured, University

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Eugene Thwing's "The Man from Red-Keg" is one of the many antique children's books on display at Charles V. Park Library on CMU's campus. Thwing's book was published in 1905. (Zack Wittman/Staff Photographer)

Famous novelist C.S. Lewis once said: “I write for children because a children’s story is the best art form for saying what I have to say.”

Children’s literature is of extreme importance for students because it’s where reading and learning about culture begins, said Anne Alton, a Central Michigan University English language and literature professor with a graduate degree in children’s literature.

CMU is home to the Clarke Historical Library, which houses a collection of antique kids books worth an estimated $40 million. It increases in value by an estimated $1 to $1.5 million each year, said Frank Boles, director of the Clarke Historical Library.

Treasure Trove of Primary Research Material at freelibrary.org

by Adrienne Pruitt, Special Collections Archivist
March 22, 2012

We have many fantastic children’s literature collections at the Free Library, including the Lloyd Alexander papers, a Beatrix Potter collection, the Tomi Ungerer papers, and the Virginia Lee Burton papers, and we wrote blog posts about most of them. I and my assistants have been working for the past two years to catalogue all of this material and get finding aids and digitized items online. Our finding aids can be seen here http://libwww.freelibrary.org/ead/ and all of the digitized items can be seen here http://libwww.freelibrary.org/diglib/DigLibLst.cfm?chk=13&srch=1&keyword=, with more to come soon. Thanks again for helping us raise awareness of these materials. We’ve seen a lot more research use in the past few years and hope it continues.

Jill Coste, SDSU Children's Lit MA Student, Receives the ChLA Graduate Student Essay Award for her paper in June Cummins' Grad Class: Congratulations

by June Cummins

March 14, 2012

I'm very happy to announce that SDSU MA student Jill Coste has won the Children's Literature Association's award for best graduate student essay (MA level) for her wonderful paper, “Coping with Compulsion Through Fantasy in Harriet the Spy, Dangerous Angels, and Wintergirls.” We are all so proud of Jill!

--------- Jill is also our Graduate Assistant at the Center for the Study of Children's Lit at SDSU.

See the new book review blog she designed at:

sdsubookreviews.blogspot.com

A.A.

New Volume, Children's Literature Association Quarterly Table of Contents, via Project Muse

Volume 37, Number 1, Spring 2012

Table of Contents

Critical Cross-overs
pp. 1-3 |
Katharine Capshaw Smith

“What Young Men and Women Do When Their Country is Attacked”: Interventionist Discourse and the Rewriting of Violence in Adolescent Literature of the Iraq War
pp. 4-26
David Kieran

Child Prison Narratives of the 1930s as Religious Filmmaking
pp. 27-42
Anne Morey


When Clothes Don’t Make the Man: Sartorial Style, Conspicuous Consumption, and Class Passing in Lothar Meggendorfer’s Scenes in the Life of a Masher
pp. 43-65
Michelle Ann Abate


Reminders of Rugby in the Halls of Hogwarts: The Insidious Influence of the School Story Genre on the Works of J. K. Rowling
pp. 66-85
Elizabeth A. Galway

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: Daniel Handler and Marketing the Author
pp. 86-107
Kendra Magnusson

Books Received
pp. 108-109
Mark I. West

Keywords for Children’s Literature (review)
pp. 110-112
Claudia Mills

Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature (review)
pp. 112-116
Richard Flynn

The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (review)
pp. 116-118
Ian Wojcik-Andrews

New Directions in Picture book Research (review)
pp. 119-121
Jane M. Gangi

The Alice Behind Wonderland (review)
pp. 121-124
Jan Susina

Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Narrative (review)
pp. 125-127
Lisette Luton

The Order of Harry Potter: Literary Skill in the Hogwarts Epic (review)
pp. 127-130
Todd Ide

from the Daily Nebraskan, excerpt

UNL professor publishes study examining nature in children’s books

By Sarah Miller

Wednesday, March 7, 2012


When J. Allen Williams Jr. was a kid, his mother read her favorite book to him: "The Secret Garden."

"I wanted my own secret garden," Williams said.

The book had such an impact on him, that he and his siblings planted flowers in the forest behind their house and actually grew a garden of their own.

Williams, a sociology professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, recently published a study examining the use of the natural environment in children's books.

His research, which began about seven years ago, found that during the last several decades, nature's prevalence has decreased in children's books.

Williams said this relates to society's increasing isolation from the natural world.

"I was surprised that it was as severe as it was," he said.

The research concluded that built environments were depicted in 58 percent of the images and were the major environment 45 percent of the time. Natural environments were present in 46 percent of the images and were the major environment only 32 percent of the time.

"As people have become less connected to the natural world, it occurs to them less, so they're less likely to write and include them in their books," Williams said.

The study examined books from 1938 to 2008 that received Caldecott Medal awards or honors. This turned into an examination of nearly 300 books and 8,100 images.

reprint

Corner: The latest kids' books to win the Coretta Scott King Awards

02/22/2012

• KAREN MACPHERSON, Scripps Howard News Service

Celebrate Black History Month by reading the latest winners of the Coretta Scott King Awards, given annually to the best children's books written and illustrated by African-Americans.
Created in 1970, the Coretta Scott King Awards are named for the late wife of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and are designed to highlight the best children's books created each year by African-American authors and artists. The awards are sponsored by the American Library Association, and the winning books are chosen annually by a group of librarians and children's-book experts.
For more information about these awards, go to: http://www.ala.org/emiert/cskbookawards. To see a list of the books that have previously won the award, go to: http://www.ala.org/emiert/cskbookawards/recipients.

Yale Environment 360, excerpt

e360 digest

31 Jan 2012: Depictions of Natural World

Declining in Children’s Books, Study Says

A new study finds a significant decline in the depiction of the natural world and animals in U.S. children’s books in recent decades, a trend researchers say may reflect society’s increasing isolation from nature. In an analysis of 296 Caldecott Medal-winning books from 1938 to 2008, a team of researchers led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist J. Allen Williams Jr. found that images of natural environments and interactions with wild animals have declined steadily. Meanwhile, depictions of built environments, such as houses and buildings, have become increasingly prevalent since the late 1960s, according to the study published in the journal Sociological Inquiry. “These findings suggest that today’s generation of children are not being socialized, at least through this source, toward an understanding and appreciation of the natural world and the place of humans within it,” the authors wrote.