Professor Jean Webb

Professor of International Children's Literature

Jean Webb is Director of the International Centre for Research in Children's Literature, Literacy and Creativity and is interested in developing research projects and consultancy across this wide spectrum. She is also course leader for the MA in ‘Children’s Literature: International Perspectives’. Jean has a number of successful PhD completions and has examined in the UK and internationally. She was an instigator and executive member of the Nordic Children’s Literature Research Network for the duration of this international funded project. Jean is an executive board member of the Children’s Literature Association, India and an international committee member of ChLA. She is on the editorial board of a number of journals including The Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, ChLA India, and Children’s Literature in Education. She has given papers at numerous international conferences including keynote lectures.

Her research interests include children’s literature from international perspectives; 19th and 20th c. English and American children’s literature. Her teaching interests include Irish Literature, Children’s Literature and English Literature from the Romantic period. In addition she is Research Training Co-ordinator for the Graduate Research School teaching the generic Research Student Training, and Research Supervisor programmes at Worcester.

Publications include:
(ed.) Text Culture and National Identity in Children’s Literature (NORDINFO 2000)

with Deborah Cogan Thacker, Introducing Children’s Literature: Romanticism to Postmodernism (Routledge 2002)

(ed.) The Sunny Side Of Darkness: Children´s Literature in Totalitarian and Post-Totalitarian Eastern Europe (University of Tallinn Press 2005)

“Genre and Convention” in Butler, C. (ed.) Teaching Children’s Fiction (Palgrave MacMillan 2006)

“Beyond the Knowing: The Frontier of the Real and the Imaginary in David Almond’s Skellig and The Fire-Eaters” in Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Marek Oziewicz (eds) Towards or Back to Human Values. Spiritual and Moral Dimensions of Contemporary Fantasy (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2006)

ed. “A Noble Unrest”: contemporary essays on the work of George MacDonald (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007)

‘Swash-buckler with a re-fashioned sword? The model of the hero in contemporary adventure stories.’ In Marxism and Children’s Literature, (University of Hertfordshire Press 2007)

‘The real and the child-like: generation and philosophy in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book’ Tove Jansson Re-Discovered K. McLoughlin ed. (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007)

forthcoming: ‘Voracious appetites: the construction of 'fatness' in children's literature.’ Critical Approaches to Food and Children’s Literature K. Keeling and S. Pollard (eds.) (Routledge 2008)