The deadline for paper and panel proposals for the 23^rd Biennial Congress of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) is fast approaching: NOVEMBER 15, 2016. 

We welcome all submissions for “Possible & Impossible Children: Intersections of Children’s Literature & Childhood Studies,” July 29 to August 2, 2017, on the Keele Campus of York University, Toronto, Canada.  Please see all details (in English and French) at www.yorku.ca/irscl17/cfp.html .

IRSCL 2017 is delighted to share (please see below) an exciting list of confirmed keynote speakers.  We hope that you will join with these speakers in contributing to the program through your proposed presentations.  We are also planning special panels at Congress 2017 on indigenous creators, intersections of diversity, youth creators, filming youth, research centres, publishing, and graduate study and professionalization.

To join IRSCL, please visit http://www.irscl.com/join.html .

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS AT IRSCL CONGRESS 2017

KEYNOTE 1: Panel of Past IRSCL Presidents

Sandra Beckett, Brock University, Canada

Clare Bradford, Deakin University, Australia

Maria Nikolajeva, Cambridge University, UK (joining us by SKYPE)

Mavis Reimer, University of Winnipeg, Canada

Kimberley Reynolds, Newcastle University, UK

John Stephens, Macquarie University, Australia

KEYNOTE 2: Peter Hunt

Peter Hunt was the first full Professor of Children’s Literature in the UK. He has lectured at over 150 universities, colleges and learned societies in 23 countries, and has written or edited 26 books and nearly 500 papers and reviews on the subject. In 2003 he was awarded the Brothers Grimm Award for services to children’s literature from the International Institute for Children’s Literature, Osaka.

KEYNOTE 3: Suzanne Pouliot (in French, with translation into English)

Suzanne Pouliot is Professor Emerita at the Université de Sherbrooke, Québec.  Her research focuses on children’s and young adult literature, literary publishing for children and youth, and representations of the Other.  She has published seven books, including three co-authored texts, such as Les représentations de l’enfant (with Noëlle Sorin) and Les bébés-livres ou l’émergence de l’écrit (with Johanne Lacroix).  She was awarded the Frances B. Russel Prize (International Board on Books for Young People Canada) and contributed “Children’s Literature in Quebec and French-Speaking Canada” to the International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature.

KEYNOTE 4: Robin Bernstein

Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who researches performance and childhood to produce new knowledge about US cultural history, and particularly American formations of race, from the nineteenth century to the present.  She is Professor and Chair of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her most recent book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five major awards, including from the Society for the History of Children and Youth, the Children’s Literature Association, and the International Research Society for Children’s Literature.

KEYNOTE 5: Daniel Goldin Halfon and Michèle Petit (in Spanish, with translation into English)

Daniel Goldin Halfon has been an editor of children’s books and has been involved in publishing, writing and speaking on culture and the written word for more than 25 years. He stimulated the growth of children’s books in Latin America by launching, in 1991, the children’s literature collections for the publishing group Fondo de Cultura Económica. He is currently Director of the Biblioteca Vasconcelos, the library with the most followers on social media in the world. In 2013 he was named as one of the 10 most influential editors in Ibero-America.

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Anthropologist Michèle Petit worked from 1972 to 2010 at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris) where she is now Ingénieure de recherches honoraire. Since 1991, she has researched reading practices in relation to written culture, especially where access to culture is not facilitated by social or family contexts. She first conducted research in France, in rural and suburban areas, and then became interested in areas in crisis, particularly in Latin America. Her work advocates that literature, oral and written, and art in all its forms, should have a place in everyday life, especially that of children and youth.

IRSCL Congress 2017
July 29 to August 2, 2017
Children’s Studies Program, York University, Toronto, Canada
E-mail: irscl17@yorku.ca
Website: http://www.yorku.ca/irscl17/
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