Dahlen to join iSchool faculty

Sarah Park Dahlen

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Sarah Park Dahlen (MS/LIS '09, PhD '09) will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2021, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. A nationally recognized scholar in children's literature, Dahlen is currently an associate professor of library and information science at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Dahlen's research addresses Korean adoption in children’s literature, Frank and Frances Carpenter’s writings for children, and diversity in children's literature and library education. She is cofounder of the scholarly journal Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, with Gabrielle Atwood Halko; coeditor of Diversity in Youth Literature: Opening Doors Through Reading (2013), with Jamie Campbell Naidoo; and co-creator of the 2015 and 2018 Diversity in Children's Books Infographics, with David Huyck, which are based on data from the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Sarah is at the forefront of current initiatives and explorations regarding diversity in literature for youth, even cofounding a peer-reviewed, open-access journal on the topic," said Dean and Professor Eunice E. Santos. "We are proud of all that she has accomplished since receiving her PhD from our School and look forward to even greater things in the years to come, as a member of the iSchool faculty."

Dahlen's honors include the Leadership Award from the iSchool's Alumni Association (2016), Faculty Teaching and Advising Award from St. Catherine University (2021), and the Mentoring Award from the Children's Literature Association (2021). She has served on several children's book award committees and curates the youth literature programming at the Asian American Literature Festival hosted by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and the Library of Congress.

"I am thrilled to return to the iSchool to pass forward all that I have learned during and since my time there," said Dahlen. "I'm excited to join a community of scholars whose work I have long admired and am eager to work with them to expand the iSchool's research and curricular offerings, especially in the area of diversity and youth services."

Tags:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

McDowell to present keynote on data storytelling

Associate Professor Kate McDowell will present the closing keynote of the Measures of Success Educator Impact Series at Western Michigan University (WMU) on March 21. The virtual series, which is sponsored by the WMUx Office of Faculty Development, focuses on equity and educator impact.

Kate McDowell

Dahlen selected as judge for National Book Awards

Associate Professor Sarah Park Dahlen has been selected by the National Book Foundation to serve as a judge for the 74th National Book Awards. The foundation chose 25 judges for this year's awards, which are given in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature.

Sarah Park Dahlen

Downie to present keynote at CHIIR 2023

Professor and Associate Dean For Research J. Stephen Downie will be the keynote speaker for the 2023 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2023), which will be held on March 19-23 in Austin, Texas. In addition to information interaction and retrieval, the multidisciplinary conference explores topics such as human-human information interaction, novel interaction paradigms, new evaluation methods, and related research from various fields.

Stephen Downie

Lawrence Auld, former faculty member, passes away

Lawrence W.S. Auld (PhD '75) passed away on March 2, 2023. He returned to school to earn a PhD in library and information science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and served on the faculty at UIUC and then at East Carolina University until his retirement in 2003.

Lawrence Auld

iSchool participation in iConference 2023

The following iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in iConference 2023, which will be held virtually from March 13-17 and physically from March 27-29 in Barcelona, Spain.