Sandra L. Beckett is Professor Emeritus of French at Brock University (Canada). She is a former president of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. She has authored numerous books, including Revisioning Red Riding Hood Around the World: An Anthology of International Retellings (2014), Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for All Ages (2011), Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives (2009), Red Riding Hood for All Ages: A Fairy-Tale Icon in Cross-Cultural Contexts (2008), Recycling Red Riding Hood (2002), and De grands romanciers écrivent pour les enfants (1997). She serves on the boards of several international journals.
Marnie Campagnaro has a PhD in Pedagogical and Educational Sciences and teaches Theory and History of Children’s Literature in Educational and Training Sciences at the University of Padua. Her research interests include children’s literature, reading promotion, visual literacy, and narrative and imaginative thinking in children. In 2013 she successfully hosted the Ninth Annual International Conference ‘The Child and the Book 2013’ at the University of Padua. Two of her most recent publications are in collaboration with Marco Dallari, Incanto e racconto nel labirinto delle figure. Albi illustrati e relazione educative (Enchantment and Stories in the Maze of Pictures. Picturebooks and Education) (2013), and Le terre della fantasia. Leggere la letteratura per l’infanzia e l’adolescenza (Fantasy Lands. Reading Children’s Literature) (2014).
Janet Evans is an Independent Scholar, freelance Literacy and Educational Consultant, and former Senior Lecturer in Education at Liverpool Hope University. She has written numerous articles and book chapters and nine books on language, literacy and maths education. Her last academic book, Talking Beyond the Page: Reading and Responding to Picturebooks, focused on a reader response approach to responding orally to picturebooks and was published in March 2009 by Routledge. Her current research interests include an exploration of children’s responses to strange, ambiguous and unconventional picturebooks. Janet has taught in India, Nigeria, Australia, America, Canada, Chile and Spain. She has given professional development courses at international schools and has presented keynotes speeches and papers at many international conferences. In 2010 she was awarded a research scholarship to study at the International Youth Library in Munich.
Klaus Flugge launched his own publishing company, Andersen Press (named after Hans Christian Andersen) in 1976. Since the early days there have been more than 2,000 titles for children by the likes of Michael Foreman, Satoshi Kitamura, David McKee and Tony Ross. The fiction list includes prize-winning work by Melvin Burgess and Sharon Creech. Andersen Press is responsible for modern classics such as I Want My Potty! by Tony Ross and Badger’s Parting Gifts by Susan Varley. Probably the best-known character of all is Elmer the Patchwork Elephant created by David McKee. Klaus has received many prestigious awards and in 2013 was awarded the honorary citizenship of Bologna for his commitment in the field of children’s books and to the Bologna Book Fair.
Kerenza Ghosh is a Senior Lecturer in English Education at the University of Roehampton. Formally a primary school teacher and English Coordinator, she convenes two English Specialism modules on the Primary Initial Teacher Education Degree. She has presented research papers at conferences within the United Kingdom, and has a chapter published, entitled ‘Walking with Wolves: Children’s Responses to the Wolf Tradition in Stories’, in Beyond the Book: Transforming Children’s Literature (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). Her ongoing research interests include polysemy within picturebooks and reader response with children.
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer is Professor in the German Department at the University of Tübingen. She is an active international editor of research volumes on picturebook theory, including New Directions in Picturebook Research (2010), Emergent Literacy. Children’s books from 0 to 3 (2011), Manga’s Cultural Crossroads (2013), and Picturebooks. Representation and Narration (2014), and co-editor of the international book series ‘Children’s Literature, Culture and Cognition’ (John Benjamins). She was speaker at the international research project ‘Children’s Literature and European Avant-garde’, funded by the European Science Foundation. Her joint work with Jörg Meibauer focuses on picturebook theory as well as on lying in children’s literature.
Elizabeth Marshall is an associate professor at Simon Fraser University, Canada, where she teaches children’s and young adult literature. Her scholarship critically examines representations of childhood and adolescence within texts produced for, marketed to, and/or consumed by youth. She is the co-editor (with Özlem Sensoy) of Rethinking Popular Culture and Media. She has published articles on Little Red Riding Hood, Nancy Drew, American Girl, Shrek, and coming-of-age memoirs, including Girl, Interrupted, The Kiss, and Stitches. Her work has been published in the Harvard Educational Review, Feminist Studies,Prose Studies, Gender and Education, Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, College English and Children’s Literature Quarterly.
Jörg Meibauer holds the chair of German language and linguistics at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and is Affiliated Professor at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. His research focuses on the semantics–pragmatics interface, the grammar of German, word formation, lexical acquisition, and the linguistics of children’s literature, especially picturebook theory (in cooperation with Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer). His monographs include Rhetorische Fragen (1986), Modaler Kontrast und konzeptuelle Verschiebung (1994), Pragmatik (1999) and Lying at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface (2014). Among his many co-edited books is the handbook Satztypen des Deutschen (2013). Currently, he is editing The Oxford Handbook of Lying.
Sandie Mourao is an independent scholar based in Portugal where she works as a teacher educator, author and consultant in the field of English language education, specialising in early years. She has an MA in TESOL from the University of Manchester and a PhD in Didactics and Teacher Education from the University of Aveiro in Portugal. Sandie’s interest in picturebooks involves her in a number of activities that include preparing materials for and with teachers to use picturebooks in English language classrooms, as well as classroom-based, reader response research with children from pre-primary through to upper secondary education. Sandie writes an award-winning blog, Picturebooks in ELT: http://picturebooksinelt.blogspot.com/
Perry Nodelman, Professor Emeritus at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, is the author of Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books,The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (third edition in collaboration with Mavis Reimer), and The HiddenAdult: Defining Children’s Literature, as well as publishing over 150 articles on various aspects of children’s literature in academic journals and essay collections. He has also written a number of books for young readers, both on his own and in collaboration with Carol Matas.
Åse Marie Ommundsen is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway. She has her PhD from the University of Oslo on Children’s Literature, with a thesis on Literary Boundary Crossings. Erasing the Borders between Literature for Children and Adults (2010). Her earlier publications include a book on religious magazines for children from 1875 to 1910 (1998), and Looking Out and Looking In: National Identity in Picturebooks of the New Millennium (ed., 2013). Her current interest is in contemporary Scandinavian children’s literature, crossover picturebooks and picturebooks for adults, on which she has published several articles in Norwegian, English, French and Dutch and lectured as a guest lecturer and keynote speaker. Her ongoing research project is ‘Norwegian children’s literature in the aftermath of 22/7’. Most recent publication: ‘Picturebooks for Adults’, in: Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (ed.) Picturebooks: Representation and Narration (2014). In 2013 Ommundsen was awarded The Kari Skjønsberg award for her research on children’s literature.
Sylvia Pantaleo is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Canada. She teaches courses in language and literacy, and children’s and young adult literature at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Grants from the International Reading Association, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University of Victoria have assisted in funding her programme of research. Her multiple classroom-based studies have explored how 6 to 13-year-old school children respond to, understand, interpret and analyse literary elements and elements of visual art and design in picturebooks and graphic novels, and other multimodal texts.