This fall GSLIS will welcome Elizabeth Hoiem as an assistant professor teaching and conducting research in youth services. She comes to GSLIS from East Carolina University, where she has been an assistant professor since Fall 2013.
While a doctoral student and instructor at Illinois, Hoiem was named in the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students for four semesters. She teaches in the areas of children’s literature, history of children’s literature, and fantasy literature. In her research and teaching, she explores the history of technological innovations in children’s literature—from early children’s books and toys to contemporary applications of digital pedagogy—and looks at modern technology through a historical lens.
"My research recovers the history of new pedagogical media and emerging literacies of the industrial era," Hoiem explained. "With such diverse faculty and students, GSLIS is an ideal place to explore what these past pedagogical shifts can tell us about our digital age. At GSLIS, I look forward to engaging with the material culture of childhood and child literacy, past and present, while approaching children's literature as a dynamic, applied field that our future professionals will help redefine."
Hoiem is active in several professional organizations, including the Children's Literature Association, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA), and the Modern Language Association. She served as the student caucus president for IAFA for two years and has co-organized several interdisciplinary conferences.
In addition to literature and the history of literature, Hoiem's research interests include community engagement—specifically, the importance of literature to contemporary youth—and digital humanities. She worked as a digital humanities graduate assistant on the Metadata Offer New Knowledge (MONK) project, a joint effort by GSLIS and the University Library at Illinois to assist humanities scholars in the discovery and analysis of text patterns in a digital environment. Currently, she is developing a project in the digital humanities that uses statistical analysis to explore the separation of literature for children and adults.
"We are delighted that Liz will be joining us at GSLIS. Her wide range of interests and activities in the history of children's literature will be a very valuable addition to our top-ranked youth services specialty. And particularly timely is her broad historical perspective on how a society's conceptualization of childhood learning can be subtly and powerfully entwined with prevailing notions of influential technologies. There are, without any doubt, lessons here that will help us understand and navigate challenges that face us today," said Allen Renear, GSLIS interim dean.
Hoiem received bachelor's degrees in English and communication design from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, in 2002. She received an MA in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2013.