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Contributors

Sreemoyee Dasgupta is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests lie at the intersection of postcolonial studies, childhood and YA studies and print culture. She will be defending her dissertation titled "Nationalism, Genre and Childhood in Colonial Indian Children’s Literature" in Fall, 2021. Her article, "Child Labour in India," which won the Judith Plotz Emerging Scholar Award, considers how child labor legislation and literary representations of child labor at different points in India's history set up very different ideas of childhood and nationhood.

Mehdi Farhoodinia is a lecturer at Islamic Azad University, Abadeh Branch. He teaches courses in English literature and translation studies. He has done research in myth, folklore, and literature for children and young adults. His paper titled “Shared concepts in American Transcendentalist Literature and the Poetry by Sohrab Sepehri” studies the archetype of the “innocent child” as well as other motifs in two different parts of the globe. Furthermore, his presentation at a conference titled “Interrelated Archetypal Patterns in The Narrative of Billy Budd by Herman Melville” investigates the archetype of the innocent child as compared to other archetypes in the story. He has translated a book titled The Growth and Nature of Drama, which presents the global circulations of dramatic genres and styles including those for children. He is currently working on a paper dealing with hybridity in Iranian American Children’s literature. He is also working on a book tentatively titled Narrative Elements in Persian Children’s Literature.

Gabriela Lee teaches creative writing and children's literature at the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines. Her fiction has been published in the Philippines and abroad, most recently in the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology, Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (New Zealand, 2020). She received the 2019 PBBY-Salanga Grand Prize, which was published as the picture book Cely’s Crocodile: The Story and Art of Araceli Limcaco-Dans (Tahanan Books, 2020). She recently contributed the chapter "Digital Liminality and Identities in Philippine Young Adult Speculative Fiction" to the volume Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age: Local, National, and Transnational Trajectories, edited by Sharmani Gabriel and Bernard Wilson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Courtney Weikle-Mills (Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh) is a scholar trained in Early American and Transatlantic studies who has become fascinated by the ways that children’s literature in the long nineteenth century was shaped by transatlantic trade, including the book trade to the Caribbean. She has written about Afro-Caribbean storytelling in "The Obscure Histories of Goosee Shoo-shoo and Black Cinderella: Seeking Afro-Caribbean Children's Literature in the Nineteenth Century," which appeared in volume 47 of Children's Literature. Her second book-in-progress, tentatively titled Little Hands and Mouths: Atlantic Commerce, Relational Ethics, and Global Children’s Literature, considers how children’s books, as nominally ethical and educational goods, imagine and help to realize diverse forms of commerce and relationality within a transatlantic context, both ethical and unethical.