Faculty Profile for Dr. Nithya Sivashankar

Biography Section

Biography and Education

I am an Assistant Professor who teaches courses on children’s and adolescent literature to undergraduate and graduate students. I have a Ph.D. in Literature for Children and Young Adults from The Ohio State University with a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in South Asian Studies, and an MA in Writing for Children from University of Central Lancashire.

In the past, I have worked as an editor at Karadi Tales, a children’s publishing house in India. My research on South Asian and South Asian American youth literature, illustrated books, dramatic inquiry, and narrative theory has appeared in journals including Journal of Children's Literature (2022), The ALAN Review (2021), Children’s Literature in Education (2019), and Research on Diversity in Youth Literature (2019), and in edited collections such as Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods (2020), Engaging with Multicultural YA Literature in the Secondary Classroom: Critical Approaches for Critical Educators (2019) and Immigrant Experiences: Expanding the School-Home-Community Dialogue (2019).

I am the Book Reviews Co-Editor for Research on Diversity in Youth Literature and currently serve as the chair of the International Committee of the Children’s Literature Association.