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Assistant Professor of Children’s and Young Adult Literature at California State University, Los Angeles
2) Evidence of successful teaching at the undergraduate level.
1) Evidence of teaching expertise in Children’s and Young Adult literature
The successful candidate will teach lower-division, upper-division, and graduate courses in the department and will design new courses in their area of expertise.
The successful candidate will be committed to the academic success of all of our students and to an environment that acknowledges, encourages, and celebrates diversity and differences. To this end, the successful candidate will work effectively, respectfully, and collaboratively in diverse, multicultural, and inclusive settings. In addition, the successful candidate will be ready to join faculty, staff, students, and administrators in our University’s shared commitment to the principles of engagement, service, and the public good.
Initial salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience.
California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) is the premier comprehensive public university in the heart of Los Angeles. Cal State LA is ranked number one in the United States for the upward mobility of its students. The University is dedicated to engagement, service, and the public good, offering nationally recognized programs in science, the arts, business, criminal justice, engineering, nursing, education, and the humanities. Founded in 1947, Cal State LA serves more than 28,000 students and more than 240,000 distinguished alumni. A majority of the University’s alumni live in the Los Angeles region, enriching their communities and contributing to the vitality of the local economy. Cal State LA is focused on developing a new bioscience entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley regions through partnerships with local business. To provide increased educational opportunities, Cal State LA recently opened a campus in downtown Los Angeles that offers graduate and undergraduate programs, as well as professional development and certificate programs. The university is home to the critically acclaimed Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs, Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center, Hydrogen Research and Fueling Facility, Billie Jean King Sports Complex and the TV, Film and Media Center.
The College of Arts & Letters at California State University, Los Angeles, is an engaged, diverse, and creative community committed to nurturing the next generation of humanists and artists and to providing a distinctive liberal arts education to all Cal State LA students.
The College is home to nationally acclaimed undergraduate and graduate programs in the humanities and the visual, media, and performing arts, delivered by an award-winning faculty committed to helping students reach their full potential academically, professionally, creatively, and personally. Our nine departments (Art, Communication Studies, English, Liberal Studies, Modern Languages and Literatures, Music, Philosophy, Television, Film & Media Studies, and Theatre and Dance) include programs that lead to Bachelor and Masters of Arts degrees, Bachelor and Masters of Music degrees, and Masters of Arts and Masters of Fine Arts degrees.
Located in one of the most vibrant and creative cosmopolitan centers of the world, our students have access to renowned venues and a rich variety of scholars, artists, and performers from a host of fields and professions. Our campus boasts one of the most diverse student populations in the country, a fact that helps us to prepare Arts & Letters graduates for successful careers in today’s multicultural environment and global economy.
The English Department at California State University, Los Angeles, cultivates students’ imaginations and critical skills through the intensive study of literature and language. Offering programs leading to the Bachelor of Arts and the Master of Arts degrees, the department provides courses that build on the traditional study of British and American literary history while encouraging students to further explore literary theory and criticism, world literatures and transnational critical paradigms, children’s literature, creative writing, rhetoric and composition, interdisciplinary cultural analysis, and the history and structure of the English language. Drawing on the richness of L.A.’s geographical and cultural context, the department equips students to see the study of literature and language as both personally enriching and publicly meaningful within their own communities. Those communities may be defined through the department’s direct engagement with the neighborhoods of East L.A. and the San Gabriel Valley or regarded as a global terrain, in which Oxford connects to Oaxaca and where ideas resonate from ancient Greece and Rome to the contemporary Pacific Rim.
Please submit the following to the Search Committee Chair at the email address below:
1) A cover letter specifically addressing minimum and preferred qualifications.
3) A list of three professional references.
5) A University Application for Employment Form
Finalists will be asked to submit
1) Three current letters of recommendation
3) A critical writing sample of app. 15 pages
Employment is contingent upon proof of eligibility to work in the United States.
Review of applications will begin November 15, 2018, and will continue until the position is filled.
Please address questions to English Department Chair:
California State University, Los Angeles
Department of English, E&T A604
Posted in positions and postings
Call for 2019 IRSCL Travel and Research Grant Applications
Posted on October 26, 2018 by admin
Members of IRSCL are invited to apply for travel grants of up to US$1,000 to enable IRSCL members to attend the 2019 Congress in Stockholm. This grant supports members who might not otherwise be able to travel to the Congress. It is necessary to be an IRSCL member in good standing at the time of application. The expectation is that your paper has been accepted and that you attend the full Congress. For more information about applications and to access the forms, see the Grants section of this website, under Travel Grants. The deadline for applications is 11 February 2019. Successful applicants will be notified in early April 2019.
Members of IRSCL are invited to apply for 2019 IRSCL Research Grants. There will be two grants, each worth up to US$2,000, intended to encourage postgraduate or early career scholars in children’s literature. Eligible activities include literary, historical, cultural, sociological, empirical and pedagogical research. Applications should include a clear outline of aims, methodology, budget allocation, and expected outcomes (no more than 4 pages in total). It is necessary to be an IRSCL member in good standing at the time of application. From 2019, the expectation is that a research report will submitted to the Board one year after the grant is awarded. For more information about applications and to access the forms, see the Grants section of this website, under Research Grants. The deadline for applications is 11 February, 2019. Winners will be announced at our Congress in Stockholm.
Posted in grant opportunities, IRSCL news
Call for Nominations for 2019 IRSCL Book Awards
Posted on October 22, 2018 by admin
This is a call to nominate books for consideration for the IRSCL Book Award. Books considered for the 2019 award must have been published during the period 2017-2019, must not have been nominated for an earlier IRSCL competition, and must deal with research on children’s literature or other forms of cultural texts for young people. Authors can nominate their own books, or IRSCL members can nominate books by other members, as long as those nominating books and the authors of nominated books are IRSCL members whose membership is up to date. Please also note that books authored by the current members of the IRSCL Board are not eligible for the Award.
In 2015, a new category of competition for edited volumes was introduced. This means that we will award up to two Book Awards in any competition, one for monographs and one for edited volumes.
Please email nominations to Larissa Wodtke (cc to Evelyn Arizpe) before January 15, 2019, along with two hard copies of the book or confirmation that you have arranged for publishers to send nominated books directly to Larissa (address below). If the book has also been published electronically and is available through open access, please include the link in your nomination.
Don’t forget to cc Evelyn Arizpe in your email.
Contact details are as follows:
Mailing address for hard copies of books:
Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures
Winnipeg, MB R3B 2E9
Posted in IRSCL news
Call for IRSCL Board Nominations
Posted on October 12, 2018 by admin
The 2019 IRSCL biennial is drawing near, and this means that there will be a new round of elections of executive board members during the general membership meeting in Stockholm. This is to invite you to nominate yourself as either a board member or as president, since Lies Wesseling’s term as president will come to an end in august 2019, and some current board members will step down as well.
To warrant continuity, aspiring board members should have tenure, and some financial support from their home institutions, as they will have to attend the annual board meeting and the biennial conference wherever these take place, so a minimal requirement is that you will have some funding for this.
If you are interested in standing for the board, please send a message to Lies Wesseling (lies.wesseling@maastrictuniversity.nl) with the following information:
Board member or president?
Motivation: why do you want to join the board, what would like to achieve?
A photograph of yourself
The board will use these data to prepare the slate of nominations. If you want to get an idea of what these look like, please visit the members only section of the IRSCL website.
Submit your nominations by February 1, 2019.
Posted in IRSCL news
Research Director of the Center for Children’s Books at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Posted on October 12, 2018 by admin
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Research Director of the Center for Children’s Books
School of Information Sciences
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Information Sciences, invites nominations and applications for the position of Research Director of the Center for Children’s Books. The School of Information Sciences at Illinois is an international leader in graduate education, and is home to world-class faculty, top-tier research, and a Master of Science in Library and Information Science program that is consistently ranked highly by U.S. News & World Report. Its mission is to lead the way in understanding the use of information in science, culture, society, commerce, and the diverse activities of our daily lives—and in doing so, change the world.
The University of Illinois is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action employer. Minorities, women, veterans and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply. For more information, visit http://go.illinois.edu/EEO. To learn more about the University’s commitment to diversity, please visit http://www.inclusiveillinois.illinois.edu.
The Center for Children’s Books (CCB) at the School of Information Sciences supports critical inquiry, professional training, and educational outreach related to youth-focused literature, resources, and librarianship. The Center’s mission is to facilitate the creation and dissemination of exemplary and progressive research and scholarship related to all aspects of children’s and young adult literature; media and resources for young (age 0-18) audiences; youth experience and information use; and youth services librarianship. Formed in 1945 along with its affiliate unit, the journal The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, the Center has established an important role in the iSchool as the leader and supporter of youth-focused research, the host of scholar- and practitioner-focused events, and the home of a 16,000-volume special collection of youth literature.
The CCB seeks a Director with broad intellectual insights, top-tier scholarly credentials and accomplishments, and the leadership and managerial capacity to actualize a bold vision for its future. Reporting to the Associate Dean for Research, and in coordination with the faculty, the School Librarian Program coordinator, and the Editor of the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, the Director will have responsibility for the strategic, programmatic, financial, fundraising, and management operations that support the mission and vision of the CCB and its role within the School of Information Sciences. Outstanding candidates will demonstrate strong commitment and experience in the education of youth and those who work with youth.
Candidates should hold a PhD in library and information science, children’s literature, or a related discipline, and have a distinguished record of teaching, research, and service that would warrant a tenured appointment at the rank of associate professor or full professor in the School.
Define and execute a strategic vision for the future by articulating the distinctive needs and opportunities of the CCB;
Attract external funding from federal agencies, corporations, foundations, and interested donors to support the Center’s mission and develop relevant partnerships; and,
Identify and realize emerging opportunities for new research, programs, and multidisciplinary initiatives that leverage the excellence of the Center and the breadth and strength of the School’s interdisciplinary culture.
The next Director is expected to bring:
The intellectual leadership and curiosity to direct a robust research program;
An appreciation of the Center’s history and its potential for the future;
An understanding of the connections between youth-focused research and professional practice;
An approach that sees youth as agents and creators in their own right and partners in research;
A boundary-crossing approach to youth experience that spans various disciplines, print and digital media, and physical and virtual spaces;
Outstanding communication skills and strong interpersonal skills;
A demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion;
A record of successful grant writing and/or fundraising;
An international-level reputation for scholarship and presentations in the field; and
Experience with the following is preferred:
Management of grant-funded projects;
Professional work with youth as a researcher and/or a practitioner;
Knowledge of and appreciation for diverse, historical, and contemporary children’s literature;
Work with diverse communities;
Supervision of student and professional staff.
This is a full-time, 9-month appointment starting in the fall of 2019; salary will be commensurate with experience.
The iSchool’s academic programs include the top-ranked Master of Science in Library and Information Science and one of the fastest growing programs at the University, the Master of Science in Information Management. In addition, the School offers a Doctor of Philosophy in Library and Information Science, the oldest program of its kind in the nation, an MS in Bioinformatics, a Certificate of Advanced Study, a Certificate of Advanced Study in Digital Libraries, and School Librarian Licensure Program. Plans for an undergraduate degree in information sciences are underway.
As a longstanding innovator in online education, the iSchool offers many programs for students who study from a distance. The total enrollment consists of more than 690 master’s students and nearly 50 doctoral students—including 195 international students—who learn with enthusiasm and contribute to the dynamic intellectual life of the School.
For more information, please visit http://ischool.illinois.edu/.
The university strongly encourages applications from individuals traditionally underrepresented in academia. Review of applications will continue until the position is filled. For full consideration, applications should be received by November 2, 2018. Candidates should provide a curriculum vitae, a letter of interest that addresses the candidate’s vision for the CCB, as well as the applicant’s motivation to apply, and a list of three professional references, including contact information. All requested information must be submitted for your application to be considered.
Interviews may be conducted before the closing date, although no hiring decisions will be made until after the search has closed. For further information regarding application procedures, you may contact Candy Edwards at cledward@illinois.edu.
Posted in positions and postings
CFP – Special Issue of IRCL: Instituting, Forgetting, and Remembering: (Post-)Colonial Practices of Child Removal in Children’s Media
Posted on October 12, 2018 by admin
Special Issue of International Research in Children’s Literature
Editors: Lies Wesseling (lies.wesseling@maastrichtuniversity.nl) and Mavis Reimer (m.reimer@uwinnipeg.ca)
The (forcible) relocation and re-education of Indigenous children at the peripheries of empire was a wide-spread form of colonial governance. Children were considered to be more malleable than their adult counterparts, meaning that colonial regimes considered it possible to “take the Indian out of the child,” or to “breed the color out of aboriginals” or to transform Indigenous children up to the points at which they could make themselves useful as local intermediaries between the coloniser and colonised. Thus, Indigenous children have often figured as both targets and tools of Western civilising projects, as a tentative solution to the perennial problem of how to govern vast nations by means of a relatively small number of colonial administrators who, moreover, often lacked in-depth knowledge of the languages and cultures of the nations they were supposed to rule.
As Karen Sánchez-Eppler has argued convincingly in Dependent States, colonial strategies for governing the peripheries of empire and pedagogical regimes for raising metropolitan children were interdependent. Empires were “raised like children” and children were “civilized like savages.” The intimate link between imperial nation and domestic nursery may help to explain why children’s literature and affiliated media such as textbooks have played such a pivotal role in instituting, forgetting, and remembering the systematic instrumentalisation of Indigenous children in (post-)colonial contexts. Educative discourses such as children’s literature and textbooks were bent on piquing metropolitan children’s interest in the colonies in a concerted effort to recruit the next generation of colonial administrators, missionaries, and entrepreneurs. Later, these discourses were complicit in the embarrassed silence in which the colonial past was shrouded after decolonization. At the same time, however, the existence of these discourses and texts also preserved the past and eventually contributed to the disruption of the silence about the “stolen generations,” “lost birds,” deracinés.
This special issue aims to analyze how children’s literature and affiliated media instituted, silenced, and remembered forcible child removal from an international comparative perspective, including but also moving beyond the conventional focus on the former British Commonwealth. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following issues:
How was the relocation and re-education of indigenous children “sold” to metropolitan children?
What versions of “family” and “family values” are propagated by children’s media that targets Indigenous children at the peripheries of empire?
How did children’s literature and textbooks respond to decolonisation?
Have exotic colonial themes, settings, and plot structures vanished from children’s media? If so, when did this occur?
When do efforts to re-present and remember child removal through children’s media gain ascendancy over silence and oblivion? How does children’s fiction relate to historiography in this respect?
Is the question of the “decolonisation of childhood” still topical? How do contemporary forms of neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, and anti-colonialism impact on the cultural construction of childhood as articulated by children’s media?
We particularly welcome transnational comparative approaches.
Abstracts due: 1 March 2019; completed papers 1 September 2019, publication July 2020.
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – Edited Collection on Sexuality and Sexual Identities in Literature for Young People
Posted on October 12, 2018 by admin
Call for Papers: Edited Collection on Sexuality and Sexual Identities in Literature for Young People
Acknowledging the capacity of literature to reflect and shape significant aspects of human development, this collection of essays takes as its central theme the representation of sexuality and sexual identities in texts for young people. Previous scholarship has established important connections between sexuality and gender, as well as sexuality and queerness, in literature for children and young adults. Investigations have also been made into the way particular genres and individual texts deal with desire, sex and sexuality.
This collection builds upon these individual approaches, while extending out to the analysis of various forms and incarnations of sexuality, across genres, texts and time periods. Keeping sexuality and sexual identities in writing for young people as its core focus, it will include analysis and discussion of representations of heterosexualities, homonormativity, trans subjectivities, asexuality, and the intersections between sexuality and other identity categories such as gender, race and class, across a range of texts and readerships.
We therefore welcome abstracts that revisit historical approaches to the study of childhood/adolescence and sexuality in literature, as well as those that provide contemporary and forward-looking models that take account of current and emerging sexual identities. Similarly, we welcome a wide range of theoretical approaches to this subject matter.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
Sex and sexuality in historical literature for children
Same-sex desire in young adult fiction from Stonewall to the AIDS era
Hetero- and homo-normative families in picture books and junior fiction
“Straightness” in junior and/or young adult fiction
Queer spaces and queer geographies in writing for young people
Trans identities in children’s texts
Intersections between sexuality and race, class, gender, ability, age and/or nationality
Transnational approaches to sex and sexuality
Connections between romance narratives and ideologies around sex and sexuality
Religion/religious themes and sexual morality
“Post-gay” identities in millennial writing for young people
The role of genre in depictions of sex and sexuality for young people
Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words and a biographical note of up to 150 words to Dr Kristine Moruzi (kristine.moruzi@deakin.edu.au) and Dr Paul Venzo (paul.venzo@deakin.edu.au) by December 1, 2018. Full papers of 6000 words will be due by May 1, 2019.
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – Harry Potter Studies
Posted on October 9, 2018 by admin
40th Annual Conference of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association
Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center
SWPACA invites scholars to submit papers to the vibrant and diverse Harry Potter Studies Area of the Southwest PCA/ACA conference. The Harry Potter Studies Area is an interdisciplinary/cross-disciplinary field that focuses on both the novel and filmic versions of J.K. Rowling’s work. Papers may address the work as a whole, specific characters, themes, relationships, social and/or cultural implications, individual texts within the series, etc.
Paper and/or panel proposals are welcomed. Any and all types of scholars, including independent scholars, graduate students, non-tenured, tenure-track, tenured and emeritus faculty are encouraged to submit. The Harry Potter Studies Area aims to emphasize a diversity of scholarship opportunities and is open to innovation in approach to research about the Potterverse. Networking among Potter scholars with an eye toward post-conference collaboration and publication is a key goal of the Harry Potter Studies Area.
Papers from the Harry Potter Studies Area presented at conferences since 2012 have been gathered into four (4) published, edited volumes released in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, with two more volumes scheduled to be released in 2019. We are an area committed to publication!
Papers submitted to the Harry Potter Studies Area are eligible for the SWPACA Travel Fellowships and the Richard Tuerk “Out of This World” Paper Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy. Dual submissions to the Area and the awards are highly encouraged. For application information, see http://southwestpca.org/conference/graduate-student-awards/.
Please consider submitting to the official SWPACA journal, entitled Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. For more information, please visit http://journaldialogue.org.
For individual paper proposals, please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to the official SWPACA database at http://conference.southwestpca.org/southwestpca/. Please also include a biographical note about each author in lieu of a full CV.
For panel proposals, please feel free to send an initial query email, or to propose the panel directly. Please include all of the information requested for an individual paper proposal for each member of the panel, as well as a working title for the panel and an additional description of no more than 300 words explaining the purpose/theme of the panel.
Please submit all questions to Dr. Christopher Bell (cbell3@uccs.edu), chair of the Harry Potter Studies Area. All proposals must be submitted to the database by November 1, 2018. Proposals sent to the chair via email will be returned and you will be asked to submit via the database. Information on the SWPACA and the conference can be accessed at http://southwestpca.org/.
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – Female Authors of Modernist Children’s Literature in Central Europe
Posted on October 9, 2018 by admin
Female Authors of Modernist Children’s Literature in Central Europe
Editors: Milena Mileva Blazić (University of Ljubljana), Yevheniia Kanchura (Zhytomyr State Technological University), and Alicja Fidowicz (Jagiellonian University)
Modernism was a cultural period that brought a lot of changes in society, art, and literature. Scientific and social progress, new ideas in psychology and pedagogy, emancipation of women, and other significant changes had a large influence on all literature, including children’s literature. Our project is to look at modernism in children’s literature of Central Europe, which was a multicultural region with different types of literary works.
We invite papers including the following topics:
Modernist tendencies in the writings of female authors from Austria, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine (years 1880-1930)
Beginnings of new trends in children’s literature created by female authors at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th
Biographical contexts of writings for children created by female authors
Reception of female authors’ writings in modernist Central Europe
Writings of women from national and religious minorities (Jewish, Muslim, Protestant…)
Contemporary reception of modernist female children’s authors
Please send your papers to: modernist.female2018@gmail.com by 1 July 2019. Before sending your paper, please contact us for editorial information.
Posted in calls for papers
IRSCL Mentoring Programme 2019
Posted on October 9, 2018 by admin
IRSCL invites young children’s literature researchers (including undergraduate students and recent PhD graduates) to apply and benefit from the mentors’ expertise and guidance related to:
We are initially offering 20 mentee places, which we will try to allocate by matching the mentees’ needs with the mentors’ expertise. Once we have matched the mentors and mentees, we will ask them to negotiate the means of communication and time commitments. We hope that the mentors and mentees are able to begin their collaboration at the beginning of February 2019.
If you are interested in participating in the program as a mentee, please fill in and submit the online application form by 21 December, 2018. You have to be a member of the IRSCL to participate in the programme.
Please email Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak at justyna.deszcz@gmail.com if you have any questions.
Posted in IRSCL news
IRSCL Book Award 2022- Applications open
Open Position: Assistant Professor in Global/Transnational Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies