Courtney Weikle-Mills
- Associate Professor, Literature Program Director, Children’s Literature Certificate Program Director
Courtney's Affiliations: Children's Literature, Global Studies Center, Cultural Studies, Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, Humanities Council
Courtney Weikle-Mills is an expert on children's literature and transnational literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specific research and teaching interests include early American and Caribbean literature, global circulation, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theory, readership and literacy, ethics, and the history of the book. Her first book, Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013), won the Children's Literature Association's Honor Book Award for an outstanding book published in 2013. Her most recent essay, “Book Publishing and the British Sphere of Influence in the 18th and 19th Centuries” appeared in Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture. Her work can also be found in Children's Literature, Who Writes for Black Children?: American Children's Literature Before 1900, The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature, Early American Literature, and American Periodicals. She is working on a new book, tentatively titled Sugarcoated Ethics: Enslavement as a Relational Crisis in Atlantic Children's Literature, which argues that the commercial development and content of early English-language children's literature were inextricably linked to Atlantic slavery, which provided an economic basis for the literature's rise and profoundly shaped its narratives, often sanitizing or "sugarcoating" ethical considerations of enslavement for young readers. She examines the distorted relational dynamics that emerged in mainstream texts alongside the more radical, though often obscured, traditions of critique and relational justice found in materials from enslaved and free Africans. She is also the creator of a collaborative digital project with Sreemoyee Dasgupta and Gabriela Lee called Round the Globe: Travel Routes of Children's Literature, which investigates how children’s literature’s history was shaped by transnational trade, colonization, and evangelism, and contextualizes children’s literature’s circulation within a framework recognizing anti-colonial response and resistance.
Courses Taught
Undergraduate Courses:
- Children and Culture
- Childhood’s Books
- American Literary Traditions
- Austen and Brontë
- Fairy Tradition
- Enlightenment to Revolution
- American Literature to 1860
- Emergence of Modern America
- Children in Pittsburgh
- Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature.
Graduate Courses:
- Interdisciplinary Methods in Literary Studies
- Imagining U.S. Citizenship
- Transatlantic Literature
- Children’s Literature
- Intersectionality in the Archives
Education & Training
- PhD, Ohio State University
Representative Publications
“Challenges, Barriers, and Possibilities” chapter co-written and co-edited with Xu Derong, Marilisa Jiménez García, Erica Kanasaka, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Ariel Baker Gibbs, Sreemoyee Dasgupta, Anna Katrina Gutierrez, Chengcheng You, and Shuqin Jiang in The Companion to Children’s Literature Studies: The Essential Guide for Getting Started and Building a Career, edited by M.O. Grenby, Emily Murphy, and Kimberley Reynolds. Bloomsbury Press. Forthcoming 2025. “Book Publishing and the British Sphere of Influence in the 18th and 19th Centuries.” Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture, edited by Claudia Nelson, Lies Wesseling, and Andrea Mei-Ying Wu. Routledge, 2023. “The Obscure Histories of Goosee Shoo-Shoo and Black Cinderella: Seeking Afro-Caribbean Children’s Literature in the Nineteenth Century.” Children’s Literature 47 (2019): 57-78. “Free the Children: Jupiter Hammon and the Origin of African American Children’s Literature.” In Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children’s Literature Before 1900. Edited by Kate Capshaw Smith and Anna Mae Duane. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. “‘My Book and Heart Shall Never Part’: Reading, Printing, and Circulation in The New England Primer.” The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Edited by Lynne Vallone and Julia Mickenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. “‘Learn to Love Your Book’: The Child Reader and Affectionate Citizenship.” Early American Literature 43 (2008): 35-61.
Research Interests
Early American children’s literature and culture, theories of citizenship, readership and literacy, transatlantic 18th-century studies