Position/Status
Professor
Director of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge
E-mail Address
ksc38@cam.ac.uk
Phone
+ 44 (0)1223 767600
Qualifications
- 1998 PhD Human Sciences, The George Washington University
- 1996 MPhil Human Sciences, The George Washington University
- 1991 MA English, Virginia Tech
- 1985 BA English Education, Virginia Tech
Recognition/Membership of Professional Bodies/Associations
- 2024 Edited Book Honor, Children's Literature Association
- 2022 Mem Fox Visiting Research Fellow, University of South Australia
- 2022 Children's Literature Article Award
- 2019 Graduate Student Mentoring Award, Illinois State University English Department
- 2018 Edited Book Award, Children’s Literature Association
- 2016 Janice Witherspoon Neuleib Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement, Illinois State University
- 2015 Outstanding University Researcher, Illinois State University
- Advisory Board, Children’s Literature, Culture and Cognition, John Benjamins
- Advisory Board, Children’s Literature and Culture Series, Palgrave Macmillan
Profile
Karen’s doctoral work in Human Sciences focused on how people create meaning through text and image. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories and methodologies and working at the intersections of aesthetics, subjectivity, and ethics, she is primarily interested in the ways children’s literature and culture instantiates and continues to inform a worldview at conscious and unconscious levels. She views children’s texts and critical theories as mutually informative insofar as even the most revered cultural critics and philosophers developed their aesthetic sensibilities and schemas through (often long-forgotten? repressed? integrated?) interaction with children’s poetry, stories, and images in picturebooks. Paying close attention to these texts thus involves an understanding of embodied debt, cognitive and affective change, cultural and material genealogies and transformational interactions, relational ethics, and the sources of creativity.
Academic Area/Links
Research Topics
- Psychoanalysis
- Cognitive Poetics
- Children’s Poetry
- Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Children’s Texts
- Literary and Cultural Theory
- Intersections of Continental Philosophy and Children’s Literature
Prospective PhD Applications
Karen welcomes contact from prospective PhD students on any topics broadly concerning children’s and YA literature, in particular in the following areas:
- Psychoanalysis
- Cognitive Poetics
- Children’s Poetry
- Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Children’s Texts
- Young Adult Literature
- Literary and Cultural Theory
- Intersections of Continental Philosophy and Children’s Literature
- Religion in children’s and YA literature
Current Research Project(s)
- Invited chapters for the Cambridge History of Children's Literature; the Oxford Handbook of YA Literature; Routledge Companion to Young Adult Literature, Routledge Companion to Literature and Humor; Bloomsbury History of Monsters
Teaching
- Postgraduate
- Course Coordinator, MPhil Part-time Research Methods Strand
- Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature (MPhil, PGCE-M)
- Arts & Creativities and Education (MPhil)
- Undergraduate
- Children’s Literature
- Play, Creativities, and Imagination
- Introduction to Education (Systems and Disciplines)
- Formal and Informal Contexts of Learning
Principal and Recent Publications
Coats, K. & Papazian, G. (2023) Emotions in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Moving Stories. John Benjamins.
Coats, K. (2023) ‘From Mulberry Street to Market Street: childness matters.’ The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 233-244.
Coats, K. (2023) ‘Poetics and Pedagogy.’ The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture, ed. by C. Nelson et al., Routledge, pp. 21-32.
Coats, K. (2023) ‘New Materialist Insights for the Text-Based Scholar.’ Children’s Cultures after Childhood, ed. by J. Deszcz-Tryhubczak et al., John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 201-219.
Coats, K., Stevenson, D. & Yenika-Agbaw, V., (Eds.) (2022) A Companion to Children’s Literature. Wiley-Blackwell. (Children's Literature Association Honor Award)
Burke, M. and Coats, K. (February 2022) Language and Literature. Vol. 31, No. 1, Special Issue: The Language, Style, and Cognition of Children’s Literature, pp. 3-118.
Coats, K. (2021) 'Line Breaks, Page Turns, and Gutters: Formal Moments of Silence in Children's Texts.' IRCL, reprinted in Silence and Silencing in Children's Literature, ed. by E. Druker et al., Makadam Publishing, pp. 103-117.
Cadden, M., Coats, K., and Trites, R. S. (2020) Teaching Young Adult Literature, MLA Options for Teaching Series.
Coats, K. (2020) ‘From ‘Death be not Proud’ to Death Be Not Permanent: Shifting attitudes toward death in contemporary young adult literature.’ International Journal of Young Adult Literature, Vol. 1, Issue 1. https://www.ijyal.ac.uk/5/volume/1/issue/1/
Coats, K. (2020) ‘In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA.’ The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature. Routledge.
Coats, K. (2020) ‘Genre and Gentrification in the Young Adult Novel.’ Examining Images of Urban Life. Edited by Laura M. Nicosia and James F. Nicosia, Myers Education Press.
Coats, K. (2020) ‘The Self in Twentieth-Century American Children’s Literature: A Tale of Two Schemas.’ Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods. Edited by Rachel Conrad and L. Brown Kennedy, Palgrave, pp. 31-49.
Coats, K. (2020) “Diverse Identity in Anxious Times: Young Adult Literature and Contemporary Culture.” Transforming Young Adult Services, 2nd edition. Edited by Anthony Bernier, ALA Neal-Schuman, pp. 17-26.
Coats, K. (2019) "Visual Conceptual Metaphors in Picturebooks: Implications for Social Justice." ChLAQ, vol. 44, no. 4 (Winter 2019), pp. 364-380. (winner of 2021 ChLA Article Award)
Coats, K. (2018) “Lacanian Psychoanalytic Criticism.” A Companion to Literary Theory. Edited by David H. Richter, Wiley Blackwell, pp. 385-95.
Coats, K. (2018) “Gender in Picturebooks.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Edited by Bettina Kummerling-Meibauer, Routledge, pp. 119-27.
