Keynote Speakers – 3rd International Symposium of Young Researchers in Children’s Literature

Åse Marie Ommundsen

Åse Marie Ommundsen is Professor of Scandinavian literature in the Faculty of Education and International Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), and Adjunct Professor at Nord University, Norway. Her interest in children’s literature and picturebooks for adults has fostered numerous publications as well as guest lectures and keynotes. She is the editor of Looking Out and Looking In: National Identity in Picturebooks of the New Millennium (Novus 2013) and coeditor of Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education: International perspectives on language and literature learning (with Gunnar Haaland and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Routledge 2022). She has served for two years in the Arts Council Norway and in the Brage Prize Jury. In 2013, she was awarded the Kari Skjønsberg Award for her research on children’s literature. She chairs the research group Challenging Picturebooks in Education.

©Photo: Sonja Balci

Elina Druker

Elina Druker is Professor of Children’s Literature at Stockholm University. Her research area covers picturebooks, illustration history, Modernism and Avant-Garde. She has published and edited several publications dealing with children’s literature, for example Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde (2015), Multicultural Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2017) and Photography in Children’s Literature (2023). She is one of the authors for the upcoming A History of Swedish Children’s and Youth Literature (2024). During the past twelve years, she has been a jury member of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, ALMA.

Mia Österlund

Research leader, Senior Associate Professor at Comparative Literature, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland, docent of Nordic literature (Helsinki University). She is leader of the research projects Competing Temporalities: Chrononormativity in Finland-Swedish Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture 2019–22 and Swedish-Language Children’s Literature Criticism and Research in Finland 2022–26 at The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. Her research is on gender and queer theory in children’s literature. She is the author of a study on crossdressing (2005), has published extensively on picturebooks and co-edited several anthologies, most recently Tidsligheter [Temporalities. Ecocriticical, Children’s Litereraty, and Cultural Theorethical Perspectives on Time] (2024) and Silence and Silencing in Children’s Literature (2021). Her current research is on temporality, fat studies, and girlhood studies. She is a senior member of the editorial board of Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research, and was one of the co-organizers of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) Congress 2019 in Stockholm.