Courtney Weikle-Mills

Acting Director of Children's Literature | Assistant Professor of English

CL 628-G

Courtney Weikle-Mills is acting director of children’s literature for the 2009-10 Term. She specializes in early American children’s literature and culture. Her research and teaching interests include theories of citizenship, readership and literacy, the novel, transatlantic eighteenth-century studies, childhood studies, and the history of the book.

Research, Publications, and Awards: Her book project, “Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Making of an American Literary Public, 1700-1865,” argues that even though early American children were not thought capable of consenting to the social compact, they came to be understood as “imaginary citizens”: individuals who figured heavily in literary representations of citizenship and were asked to imagine themselves as citizens through reading. She traces the history of children’s imaginary citizenship by analyzing literary and political images of the child, as well as children’s reading materials and practices from the intensive reading of the Puritan closet to the extensive reading of the nineteenth-century schoolhouse.

Her most recent article, “’Learn to Love Your Book’: The Child Reader and Affectionate Citizenship” appeared in volume 43 of Early American Literature. She also has written an article on the New England Primer for the Oxford Handbook to Children’s Literature (forthcoming, 2010).

She was a 2008 recipient of the Reese Fellowship for Research on the History of the Book at the American Antiquarian Society. She also received a 2008 Arts and Sciences Third Term Research Grant.

Teaching: She teaches courses on children’s literature from a variety of periods, as well as classes on eighteenth and nineteenth-century American literature.

Undergraduate Courses:

Englit 560: Children and Culture
Englit 562: Childhood’s Books
Englit 570: American Literary Traditions
Englit 1645: Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature
Englit 1900 Junior Seminar on the Transatlantic Novel and Fictions of National Identity

Graduate Course:

Englit 2209: Imagining U.S. Citizenship in Literature