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Karen Coats

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

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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

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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

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Teaching

  • Postgraduate
  • Undergraduate
    • Children’s Literature
    • Play Creativities and Imagination
    • Introduction to Education (Systems and Disciplines)
    • Formal and Informal Contexts of Learning

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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.