We are delighted to announce
YASA’s Executive Board
for the 2020-2022 term.
President
Dr Leah Phillips has research connections with University College London and the University of Warwick. She has an international reputation as a leading figure in the field of YA literature studies where her work focuses on representations of adolescent girls in speculative fiction. She is currently revising her first monograph: Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction: Reframing Myths of Adolescent Girlhood, which is due out with Bloomsbury in 2021. Leah is also on the Children’s Literature Association’s Phoenix Committee and a member of The International Journal of Young Adult Literature’s Editorial Board.
Contact Leah on yasapresident@gmail.com or via Twitter: @Le_phill.
Vice President
Emily Corbett is a final year PhD Candidate at the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, where she is pursuing a project on twenty-first-century YA literature. She is also an Associate Editor of The International Journal of Young Adult Literature, and her first article entitled “Transgender Books in Transgender Packages: An Investigation of ‘Coming Out’ in the Peritexts of Twenty-First Century Anglo-American Transgender Young Adult Novels” is forthcoming in Autumn 2020.
Contact Emily on yasavicepresident@gmail.com or via Twitter: @EmilyCorbett11.
Secretary-Treasurer
Jennifer Gouck is a PhD student at University College Dublin. Funded by the Irish Research Council, Jennifer’s thesis focuses on representations of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in contemporary American Young Adult Literature, Media, and Culture. She is also a feature writer and fiction reviewer for YA literary journal, Paper Lanterns. In 2018, Jennifer was shortlisted for the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature Biennial Award for an Outstanding Thesis on Children’s Literature for her work on rape (culture) in Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It (2015).
Contact Jennifer via Twitter: @jenniegouck
Membership Manager
Dr. Rebekah Fitzsimmons is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in the social and intellectual history of children’s literature, especially markers of prestige and popularity, such as prizes, bestseller lists, and “best of” lists. Her most recent project uses Digital Humanities approaches to examine early lists of texts that formed the earliest discussions of a children’s literature canon. Her recently released co-edited collection Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction brings together essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types in YA fiction. Her contribution to that collection “Exploring the Genre Conventions of the YA Dystopian Trilogy as Twenty-First Century Utopian Dreaming” examines patterns and themes across a broad range of dystopian trilogies published between 2005 and 2015. Rebekah is also a member of the Children’s Literature Association’s Membership Committee.
Contact Rebekah at Fitzsimmons@CMU.edu or via Twitter @DrFitzPhD
Social Media Coordinator
Emily Booth is a final year PhD candidate at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Her research explores how teenagers respond to adult influence on their reading practices in the contexts of leisure reading, school reading, and industry engagement. She has published widely on diversity in Australia’s young adult fiction publishing industry and interviewed over 50 YA authors at public events. In 2019, she was awarded the UTS Social Impact Grant in-full for her project, ‘Investigating the publication of Australian picture books by and about people from diverse communities in 2018’, in partnership with Australian advocacy group Voices From the Intersection. She is the inaugural student member of the UTS Human Research Ethics Committee and the first internationally-based contributor to global readers’ advisory service NoveList. She has also been a specialist children’s and young adult fiction bookseller since she was a teenager herself.
Contact Emily via Twitter (and other social media platforms): @uncoverallure
