About us
Anita Wincencjusz-Patyna Art historian and critic, doctor in art sciences. Assistant professor at The Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, Head of Art History and Philosophy Department. Author of Stacja Ilustracja: Polska ilustracja książkowa 1950-1980 [Station Illustration: Polish Book Illustration 1950-1980], Odpowiedni dać rzeczy obraz: O genezie ilustracji książkowych [To Find Relevant Images to Words: On Origins of Book Illustrations], co-author of Look! Polish Picturebook (2016), and an editor-in-chief of Captains of Illustration: 100 Years of Children’s Books from Poland (2019). Member of Polish Section of IBBY. Jury member of book graphic contests in Poland and abroad. Curator of art exhibitions.
Benoît Crucifix is post-doctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. His Ph.D. dissertation, conducted at ULiège and UCLouvain as a FNRS fellow, looked into the gestures of transmission that shape and organize comics memory in the contemporary North American graphic novel. His current research, as a part of the ERC-funded COMICS programme, bears on children’s drawing and creative tactics of child readers in European bande dessinée. The research program is led by Maaheen Ahmed (grant no. 758502). He co-edited the essay collection Comics Memory: Archives and Styles (Palgrave, 2018) with Maaheen Ahmed, and the two-volume Bande dessinée et Abstraction (Abstraction and Comics) with ACME (Presses universitaires de Liège and La 5e couche, 2019). He is also co-editor of the journal Comicalités. Contact: Faculty of Arts Philosophy, Department of Literary Studies, Blandijnberg 2, 9000, Gent, Belgium. Mail: Benoit.Crucifix@UGent.be
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer is a Professor in the German Department at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. She has written four monographs and (co)edited more than twenty collections, among them The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (Routledge, 2018) and Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education (eds. with Åse Marie Ommundsen and Gunnar Haaland, Routledge, 2021). Her research interests focus on the history and theory of the picturebook, postwar German children’s literature and culture, canon processes in children’s literature and the impact of the Avant-garde on children’s literature and children’s films. Several joint papers with Jörg, dealing with a comparison between West German (FRG) and East German (GDR) children’s literature, are in the pipeline.
Birgitte Beck Pristed is Associate Professor of Russian Studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. from the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany, awarded with distinction 2014. She is author of an illustrated monograph on contemporary Russian book design and print culture The New Russian Book. A Graphic Cultural History (Palgrave, 2017). Her main research areas are print and book history, visual and material cultures of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras with a special focus on Soviet children’s books and self-made news media.
Camilla Jonasson is from Malmö, Sweden. Her dissertation The right to Soundscape the World from 2020 gave a contribution to the understanding of the relationships between music technology and girls and transgender persons in music-making from a gender equality perspective. Camilla has a background as a musician (drummer and singer-songwriter), music and Swedish teacher in primary school, teacher, and supervisor at Malmö University, and as a producer at Unga Musik i Syd. She currently works with school-based research and development of education at Pedagogisk Inspiration (PI) Malmö and is affiliated at Malmö University as a researcher.
Cécile Pichon-Bonin is research fellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS-France). She devoted her PhD thesis to the relationship between paintings and politics in the USSR during the 1920s-1930s (published in 2013, Presses du réel, Dijon). Pichon-Bonin has also published several articles and delivered various lectures on 1920s and 1930s Soviet painting. She integrates into her approach issues relating to institutional history and to the social history of art, while taking a particular interest in the operation of systems for offering commissions and organizing exhibitions. She has also studied channels of circulation and the content of the discourse of Soviet critics. Her new research project is devoted to children’s book illustrations in the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s. She runs a tutorial on method as part of Laurence Bertrand Dorléac’s art history course at Sciences Po, where she also teaches a course on the analysis of images Since 2016, she has worked on Russian and Soviet visual culture of children from the end of the 19th c. to WW2.
Charlotte Lindgren is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Sciences with a focus on French, employed at the Department of Education and Educational Studies and the Department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University (Sweden). Her early research focused on the translation of children's books, mainly from Swedish to French, within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies, polysystem theory and multimodal text and its translation. She has in particular studied the representation of children and its translation, the translation of spoken language and the translation of sensitive themes. Her current research concerns the use of children's literature by French language teachers in schools.
Ines Soldwisch is a private lecturer for modern and contemporary history at RWTH Aachen University. So far she has written 2 monographs on the history of the liberal party in the GDR and the history of the European Parliament, 3 collective volumes on the regional history and history of Aachen and a series of essays on the subjects of European integration, GDR history and cultural history. Her research interests are in European integration and the history of the GDR. Her latest research project together with Lisa Källström is devoted to the publication of Astrid Lindgren's book "Pippi Longstocking" in the GDR, the publication conditions in connection with the social, societal and political history of the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s.
Jörg Meibauer is Professor Emeritus of German Language and Linguistics at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Current fields of research include lying and deception, pejoration and hate speech, and language and children’s literature. He is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Lying (2019) and the author of Sprache and Bullshit [Language and Bullshit] (2020). Two further monographs on Sprache und Hassrede [Language and Hate Speech] and Sprache und Kinderliteratur [Language and Children’s Literature] are in the making. Several joint papers with Bettina, dealing with a comparison between West German (FRG) and East German (GDR) children’s literature, are in the pipeline.
Lena Anlauf is a doctoral candidate in Buchwissenschaft at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, researching Soviet picture books of the 1920s from a publishing historical perspective with a focus on children’s books as cultural heritage. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Buchwissenschaft and Philosophy and a Master’s degree in Buchwissenschaft from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Furthermore, she is editorial director for children’s books for the German publishing house “Kunstanstifter – Verlag für Illustration” and is also creating own picture book projects in collaboration with author-illustrator Vitali Konstantinov, Bartgeschichten (2021).
Lisa Källström, teaches in the position of senior lecturer both at the Department of Communication Studies at Lund University and at the Department of Communication, Language, Media at Malmö University, Sweden. In her phd Pippi Between Worlds and Words (2020), she stresses that Looking is a special form of activity. To notice, to have a closer look, to shift perspective and to question ones view is something people do – and not simply a matter of receiving sensory data but of constructing meaning based on what we think we know about the world. She argues that things arise in the fields of power and material flows. It is by intervening in these force fields and following the flow lines that we interact with things, and find our own paths or lines in the material surface. Discussing cover images and sketches of Pippi Källström stresses the dynamic meetingpoint between image and gaze as a creative act to join with those very forces that bring form into being. Her recent projects “Putte och Pippi i världen” (with Petra Bäni Rigler) and “Pippi beyond the border” (with Ines Soldwisch) are granted research funding (from Ridderstad versus Baltic Sea Foundation).
Maaheen Ahmed is associate professor of comparative literature at Ghent University, Belgium and principal investigator of the COMICS project. She obtained her PhD (with distinction) from Jacobs University Bremen in 2011. Since then, I have held postdoctoral positions at the Université catholique de Louvain (Marie Curie co-fund) and Ghent University (FWO). She has worked on contemporary, alternative graphic novels and comics in English and in French. Her interests are wide: she has written and presented on superheroes, autobiographical comics, the representation of war in comics and, more recently, children in comics. Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2016. Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics is under contract with the same press. I have also co-edited volumes such as The Cultural Standing of Comics/Le statut culturel de la BD, with Stéphanie Delneste and Jean-Louis Tilleuil (Academia/L’Harmattan, 2017) and, most recently, Comics Memory with Benoît Crucifix (Palgrave, 2018). Her work has appeared in journals such as European Comic Art, Children’s Geographies and Comicalités. She is currently PI of COMICS, a multi-researcher project on children and/in European comics (grant no. 758502).
Marcus Axelsson is a Senior Lecturer of Scandinavian Languages at the Department of Languages, Literature and Culture at Østfold University College in Halden, Norway. Since he defended his PhD in 2016 at Uppsala University, he has mainly directed his research interest toward the translation of children’s books and YA novels for girls. He specializes within the fields of translation sociology and polysystem theory. His current research deals with the translation of book cover images and other paratextual elements presented on book covers.
Marnie Campagnaro is an Assistant Professor at the University of Padova and didactic coordinator of a postgraduate course in Children’s Literature. Her main research fields include picturebooks, visual and aesthetic literacy, architecture, ecocriticism and Italian children’s writers. In 2013, she hosted the Ninth Annual International Conference on The Child and the Book network, in 2017 the 6th International European Network of Picturebook Research Conference and in 2020 the 1st International Conference Fostering Dialogue on teaching children’s literature at university. Her most recent publications include Picturebooks and aesthetic literacy in early childhood education (in Ommundsen, Haaland & Kümmerling-Meibauer (Eds.), 2021), Materiality in Bruno Munari’s Book Objects (Libri & Liberi, 2019).
Petra Bäni Rigler, is a lecturer at a pedagogical highschool (PH FHNW) where she teaches (Scandinavian) children’s literature and its didactics. In her PhD Bilderbuch-Lesebuch-Künstlerbuch. Elsa Beskows Ästhetik des Materiellen (2019) she analyses Beskow’s picture books and reading books based on material theories. Thereby she puts the focus on children’s reading and writing which is not to separate from the book as an artefact. Her main research interests are about materiality, reading/writing and creative processes, text-image relations, and childhood studies. In the actual project together with Lisa Källström “Putte och Pippi i världen” (granted research funding by Ridderstad) she examines the changes of a picture book in different countries.
Valerie Alfven is an assistant professor with a focus on translation (translation sociology). She has a special interest in children's and young people's literature. She defended her dissertation in French with a dissertation on the translation into French of “unprovoked violence” in Swedish youth novels. She is a member of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST), the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL), the Réseau nord-européen de traduction des littératures francophones, the Swedish Network for Translation Studies (SNÖ). She is also a member of the editing committee for Revue nordique des études francophones franorfon.org