Уляна Баран

New Ukrainian Children’s Literature Center

IRSCL NEWSLETTER

No. 47                                                                       Spring/Summer 2004

Letter from the President

Kimberley Reynolds

New Members

We are pleased to welcome 1 new institutional member and 13 new individual members.  It is particularly nice to have our first member from the Ukraine. Ulyana Hnidets joined IRSCL after the board meeting in Bulgaria this May, where she had the chance to listen to papers by and talk to members of the board. Several new members joined after a recent forum for research students working in the field held in London.  An impressive number of younger/newer IRSCL members from around the world attended the event, and gave varied papers of a consistently high quality.  These will appear in a special number of The New Review of Children’s Literature.

National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, San Diego State University, San Diego, USA

Evelyn Arizpe, Research Associate, University of Cambridge, UK

Laura Atkins, PhD-student, University of Surrey Roehampton, London, UK

Bridget Carrington, PhD student, University of Surrey Roehampton, London, UK

Sebastien Chapleau, PhD-student, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

Maureen Farrell, Senior Lecturer, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

Ulyana Hnidets, Lecturer, National University Lvivska Polytechnika, Lviv, Ukraine

Christine Holliger, Director, Swiss Institute for Children’s and Young Adult’s Media, Zürich, Switzerland

Karen Hill McNamara, Assistant Professor, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, USA

Astri Ramsfjell, Associate Professor, Queen Maud’s College of Early Childhood Eucation, Trondheim, Norway

Mavis Reimer, Associate Professor, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada

Hiroe Suzuki, Research Fellow, Shirayuri College Research Center for Children’s Literature and Culture, Tokyo, Japan

Akiko Yamazaki, Lecturer, Saitama Institute of Technology, Saitama, Japan
Machiko Yano, Lecturer, Kantogakuin University, Tokyo, Japan

IRSCL NEWSLETTER

No. 53                                                                                   Spring/Summer 2007

Letter from the President

At the Kyoto congress we will hold the elections for the new board and I will have finished my term as President of the IRSCL. One of the things we will be doing in Kyoto is announcing plans for our 40^th anniversary celebrations, which will take place at the 2009 congress in Frankfurt – chosen because the Society came into being at a colloquium in Frankfurt in 1969.With this in mind, and in the knowledge that we have many new members, I thought this would be a good moment to look back over the history of the IRSCL and some of the figures who have helped shape it. Some of these – Klaus Doderer, Gôte Klingberg, and Jean Perrot – have been made IRSCL Fellows and you can read about them in the newsletters that are archived on the website so I won’t repeat the details here. Instead, I would like to take up the story in 1985, when Anne Scott MacLeod became President, since this marked a turning point in the IRSCL. What follows is only an informal, anecdotal series of fragments. I hope one day a member will decide to write a history of the IRSCL based on the archives that are now in immaculate order in Frankfurt. The 2009 congress will provide many of us with an opportunity to go back through the material they contain and perhaps even bring things to fill in any gaps in our holdings. Again, you can read about the archives on the website.

As I understand it, before 1985 there was much commitment to the subject of children’s literature and pleasure in each others’ company on the part of the founding members, but perhaps little sense of the future. That the Society will shortly be celebrating its 40^th anniversary owes much to the work done while Anne Scott MacLeod was President. In recent correspondence she shared some memories with me that I think will be of general interest since many of us working in this age of email, cheap flights and widespread acceptance of children’s literature as an academic discipline may forget why the Society was needed and how time-consuming it was to manage an international organisation.

Anne explained that, "At the first meeting of the new board, we undertook to write some by-laws to govern voting and proxies and such like.” Although some have been amended, we continue to use the original by-laws today: they helped to give the young IRSCL a strong sense of identity and purpose. That board also had to deal with the fact that membership and financial matters needed serious attention. As Anne recalled, "The worst problem was finding a treasurer.  Understandably, no one wanted the job….In my second term, Riita Kuivasmakki agreed to serve as treasurer.  She was very experienced, very organized and competent and finally got the treasury--small as it was--in order and the membership lists, too.  Then we set some simple rules for elections, to avoid the chaos and assure that only paid members voted, with legitimate proxies allowed from other paid members.  It all made quite a difference; peace descended and we got to work on other things.” 

Anne was full of praise for the board members who organised the meetings in Cologne (1987) and Salamanca (1989). Another former President, Sandra Backett, also recalled Spanish hospitality, this time at the home of then board member Marisol Dorao during Rhonda Bunbury’s presidency while plans were being made for the 1995 congress. More dramatic was the time, during Sandra’s first year as IRSCL President, when the board members were inadvertently locked in a wildlife park after closing time while preparing for the 2001 meeting in South Africa!

One thing that all those I have spoken to stress about the IRSCL is that it was set up as an inclusive body, designed to support individuals and scholarship in all aspects of research in children’s literature. For this reason membership fees are kept very low, and though we try to run the Society professionally, all the work is done by self-financing volunteers. We also have a long-standing commitment to making sure no one is excluded from the Society for financial reasons. This limits to some extent what we can do, but it means that our members come from all over the world and are involved in many kinds of research on a great range of texts and issues. The dynamism of the mixture is always apparent when members come together at congresses and symposia. One such event was the conference organised by our member Ulyana Hnidets in Lviv this April, an account of which follows below.

Anne concluded her reminiscences by reflecting on publications: "Publication was always a thorny issue--so expensive to do, so little market for proceedings or even selections at the price that had to be asked.” The situation has changed little over the years but as I hope all members know through the online message I circulated, we have at last had a major breakthrough. With the help of former board member Ann Lawson Lucas we have agreed a contract with Edinburgh University Press that will enable the IRSCL to have its own journal. Members were polled and more than half responded by the deadline with only two votes against developing this exciting opportunity so we are going ahead. In the following pages and on the website you will find person and job specifications for the positions of Senior Editor, the Congress and Reviews editors together with an invitation to applicants. Those who take up these positions will be making a long-term contribution to the IRSCL and potentially improving our financial situation. If the journal succeeds, we may be able to provide some support for the positions in due course as well as subsidising subscriptions for members and perhaps increasing the number and/or size of the grants we make. At this stage, however, we need experienced and committed colleagues who can dedicate the time to launching the International Review of Children’s Literature (IRCL). There will be a special meeting about the journal at the Kyoto congress; more information appears later in this newsletter.      

                                                                       Also in this newsletter you will find nomination forms for the next board. I hope that you will take the time to think about who could serve the Society well – not forgetting some of our recently retired members, who might have more time to devote to developing activities and publications than those of us who are still managing full institutional workloads. Getting a strong and active board is central to securing the future of the IRSCL. We already have a healthy number of members who have put their names forward but the process is still open. Candidates will post brief statements about themselves and their aims for the Society on the website before the congress where the vote will be held. Please note that there is a proxy voting form with the nomination forms for those who are unable to attend the congress.

                                               My President’s report in Kyoto will give me the opportunity to summarise the developments that have taken place over the last four years, but I would like to end this message by thanking you all for your enthusiasm and support for the work of the IRSCL.

Kimberley Reynolds