Keynote Speakers
Marina Balina is Isaac Funk Professor and Professor of Russian Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University, USA. Her main area of investigation is children’s literature in Soviet Russia, its historical development, and theoretical originality. Her scholarly interests include the hybrid nature of life-writing in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia (autobiography, memoir, diary, and travelogue) and she has published widely on this subject.
Dr. Balina is the founding member of the Working Group for the Study of Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (currently Childhood in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and Russia) that unites scholars dedicated to the study and promotion of children’s literature of the former Eastern Bloc. In 2012, Dr. Balina was elected member of the International Committee of ChLA and from 2014 through 2017 she served as Chair of this committee.
She is the author, editor and co-editor of numerous volumes, among which Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (with Larissa Rudova, 2008); Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (with Evgeny Dobrenko, 2009); The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Russian Literature (with Evgeny Dobrenko, 2011); and To Kill Charskaia: Politics and Aesthetics in Soviet Children’s Literature of the 1920s and 1930s (2014). Her forthcoming works include an editorial volume on Hans Christian Andersen and Russia (University of Southern Denmark Press, late fall of 2018) and a co-edited volume under the tentative title The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, among them the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the American Comparative Literature Association, the 2010 Distinguished Scholar Award from the Children’s Literature Association, and a 2017 DAAD Fellowship.
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer is Professor in the German Department at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She has been a guest professor at the University of Växjö, Sweden, and the University of Vienna, Austria. Her main areas of interest are international children’s literature, picturebook research, children’s films, children’s literature and the avantgarde, and the interfaces of children’s literature and emergent literacy.
She is an expert in international children’s classics and has published widely on canon processes in children’s literature. She has authored an encyclopedia of international children’s classics (two volumes, 1999), a monograph on canon processes in German children’s literature (2003), and has co-edited Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature (with Anja Müller, 2017).
Bettina is the co-editor of the two book series: “Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition” (John Benjamins) and “Studies in European Children’s and Young Adult Literature” (Universitätsverlag Winter). She has been Chair of the EU project “Children’s Literature and European Avant-Garde”, funded by the European Science Foundation. Since 2017 she has been a member of the international committee of ChLA.
She is the editor and co-editor of numerous volumes, among them Emergent Literacy: Children’s Books from 0 to 3 (2011); Learning from Picturebooks (with Jörg Meibauer, Kerstin Nachtigäller, and Katharina Rohlfing, 2015); Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde (with Elina Druker, 2015), winner of the ChLA Edited Book Award 2017 and the IRSCL Edited Book Award 2017; Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature (with Nina Goga, 2017); and The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (2018).