My graduate studies in children’s literature have focused on exploring literary theory and performing literary criticism on books for children and young adults.
However, my library experience occasionally draws my academic interests from the theoretical to the practical. I am particularly interested in how books and reading and genres are formed and function in the “real world”
To give you an idea of what I am interested in, here are some titles of papers I have written:
- Real Life on the Page: Characterization in Picturebook Biographies
- Required Recovery: Empowerment and Powerlessness in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak
- The Wildest, Largest Passions: The Male Perception of the Female Body in Young Adult Literature
- The Good, the Bad, and the “Eh:” Revisiting “The Parent Problem in Young Adult Literature”
- The Space Between: Defining Adolescence in Polly Oliver’s Problem
- Raising Ellen Montgomery: Christian Nurture in The Wide, Wide World
- Printz Poster Boy: Positionality in and around John Green’s Looking for Alaska
Other areas that pique my interest include:
- Marxism & the publishing industry; books as tools of an Ideological State Apparatus
- Children’s and young adult literature as represented in popular news media
- The contemporary school story
- Book awards and canonicity
- The historic role of the children’s librarian in the culture of children’s literature
If only I had time to research it all!
