Hoiem and Schwebel present research at ChLA 2021

Elizabeth Hoiem
Elizabeth Hoiem, Assistant Professor
Sara Schwebel
Sara L. Schwebel, Professor and Director, The Center for Children's Books

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem and Sara L. Schwebel, professor and director of The Center for Children's Books, participated in the Children's Literature Association (ChLA) annual conference, which was held virtually on June 10-12. This year's conference explored the idea of the arcade, broadly understood, in children's and young adult literature, media, and culture.

Hoiem presented the paper, "The Forge and the Fireside: Gendered Spaces in Victorian STEM Books," which investigates the historical origins of how STEM education is gendered today by examining Victorian books about technology. According to Hoiem, the books show learning taking place in two settings—the forge and the fireside.

"Just as the Victorian sitting room serves as an index for knowledge of global trade, with china or silverware carefully organized in curio drawers, the boys' workshop illuminated by the forge references globally sourced artisan knowledge and raw materials, through its organized tools and stocks. There is a remarkable correspondence between the workshop and the sitting room, or the forge and the fireside," she said. "Victorian STEM books thus create some of the first representations of boys conducting messy engineering experiments, from which girls are excluded."

In her research and teaching, Hoiem explores the history of technological innovations in children’s literature, from early children's books and toys to contemporary applications of digital pedagogy. She received a 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her current book project, "The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Culture, 1752-1860." This project investigates the class politics of "object lessons," a mode of experiential learning that developed during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the rise in child labor and mass literacy.

Schwebel organized two panels for ChLA 2021 with Jocelyn Van Tuyl, professor of French at New College of Florida, chairing one panel, "The Newbery Centennial: Who is Seen in the U.S. South." Schwebel and Van Tuyl coedited a book marking the 100th anniversary of the American Library Association's first children's literature prize, the Newbery Medal. Their book, Dust off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial will be released by Routledge this summer.

"Our panels featured six presenters, representing just under half of the chapters in our forthcoming volume," said Schwebel.

Schwebel's research areas include children's and young adult literature, history/social studies pedagogy, public history, and digital humanities. She is the author of Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms (2011) and the editor of Island of the Blue Dolphins: The Complete Reader's Edition (2016) and The Lone Woman and Last Indians Digital Archive.

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

Postdoctoral Research Associate Program prepares future faculty

In the 2021-2022 academic year, the iSchool launched its Postdoctoral Research Associate Program. The goal of this program is to prepare candidates for tenure-track assistant professor or other appointments inside and outside of academia. The cohort has grown to five postdocs, and applications are currently being accepted for the 2023-2024 academic year.