Courtney Weikle-Mills
- 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 second book, Sugarcoated Ethics: Children's Literature and Atlantic Enslavement, it has been recently released from Johns Hopkins University Press. The book argues that the commercial development and content of early English-language children's literature were inextricably linked to the system of 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.
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?, The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature, Early American Literature, and American Periodicals.
She is 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
- Minor Subjects: Childhood, Literacy, and Marginality
Education & Training
- PhD, Ohio State University
Representative Publications
Books
Sugarcoated Ethics: Children’s Literature and Atlantic Enslavement. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026.
Imaginary Citizens: Child Readers and the Limits of American Independence, 1640-1868. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Articles
“Challenges, Barriers, and Possibilities” chapter co-edited with Xu Derong and co-written with contributors we solicited: Marilisa Jiménez García, Erica Kanasaka, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Ariel Baker Gibbs, Sreemoyee Dasgupta, Anna Katrina Gutierrez, Chengcheng You, and Shuqin Jiang. A Practical Companion to Children's Literature Studies: Conducting Research and Building a Career, edited by Kimberly Reynolds, Matthew Grenby, and Emily Murphy. Bloomsbury Press, 2026.
“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.
“An American Revolution in Children’s Literature?” Children’s Literature and Culture, Adam Matthew Digital Archive, Fall 2020.
“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.
Guest Editor, Special Issue of American Periodicals on Children’s Periodicals. 22.2 (2012).
“‘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.
Digital Project
Round the Globe: Travel Routes of Children’s Literature website, with collaborators Sreemoyee Dasgupta and Gabriela Lee. Author of Caribbean content, about page, and maps page, as well as creator of Caribbean maps. Launched Spring 2021.
Research Interests
Early American children’s literature and culture, theories of citizenship, readership and literacy, transatlantic 18th-century studies
