Marah Gubar is an associate professor of literature at MIT. Previously, she directed the Children’s Literature Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her book Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (2009) won the Children’s Literature Association Book Award. She is currently working on a book project entitled “How to Think about Children: Childhood Studies in the Academy and Beyond.”
Marah Gubar
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Writing on Public Books
The 90-Second Newbery: An Interview with James Kennedy
“Trade and plum-cake forever, huzza!” So said John Newbery, the 18th-century …
Empathy Is Not Enough
Almost 30 years ago, education researcher and children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop introduced an analogy that has been widely embraced by the librarians, teachers, artists, and scholars involved in the #weneeddiversebooks movement. Stories featuring underrepresented minorities, Bishop observed, can function as both mirrors and windows. Members of marginalized groups can see themselves represented as […]
Losing Their Religion
Rarely do we pity the pious Victorian patriarch. Why should we sympathize with the privileged men who stoutly believed that God had placed them at the apex of a “Great Chain of Being”? One of the many marvelous feats of Francis Hardinge’s gorgeously written novel The Lie Tree is that it secures some pity for […]
The Teflon Kid: How Annie Enables Apathy About Inequality
What’s not to like about seeing an adorable black child nestled up with a baby animal on the cover of the New York Times Style Magazine? The composition of this shot links child actor Quvenzhané …
The Mixed-Up Kids of Mrs. E. L. Konigsburg
Imagine that you are a children’s book editor. An unproven writer who has only recently sold her first story sends you her second effort. The manuscript opens with a rich old lady’s note to her lawyer; she is sending him a story, she explains, to help him understand why she wants to change her will. […]
Body Projects: The Killer Makeover in Recent YA Dystopias
As the Hunger Games begin, the makeover—that staple of reality television—is itself made over from dream into nightmare. Forced to fight to the death against other teens on live TV, contestants such as sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen must first give themselves up to a team of stylists at the “Remake Center.” Rather than depicting this beautification […]
Good Morning iPad: Technology in 21st-Century Picture Books
After teaching her class the “Star light, star bright” rhyme, my son’s preschool teacher invited each child to express a wish to be inscribed onto a paper star for them to decorate. Lousy with glitter, my son’s star read: “I wish I could play with electronics whenever I want.” From earliest toddlerhood, he had been […]
