About Jade
Dr Jade Dillon is an Associate Professor of Children's Literature and Young Learners within the department of Teacher Education at NTNU. Her research focuses on the visual iconography of the ‘Alice’ figure created in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and it traces the progression of Alice’s characterisation through multimodal platforms including illustration and fine art photography. She is also interested in representations of puberty and menstruation in children's texts. Her current research project investigates how the female child's body is altered through physical and metaphysical space, thus initiating menstrual development.
She has published her research with numerous academic journals and books, including Palgrave Macmillan and McFarland, as well as general articles on children’s literature with RTE Brainstorm. She is currently co-editing a volume entitled Family in Children’s and Young Adult Literature with Dr Eleanor Spencer which is due to be published with Routledge in 2022.
Since July 2020, Jade has been a staff member on the Children’s Literature Summer School programme at Trinity College Dublin. She is responsible for lecturing virtual seminar and asynchronous sessions on visual representations in children's literature to teachers, students, librarians, educationalists and children's literature enthusiasts.
Over the past number of years, Jade has been invited to give a series of lectures on children’s literature to the Department of Education students at Mary Immaculate College. In these lectures she discussed the pedagogical approaches to gender representations in children’s literature, the impact of sexuality in children’s literature, and the remodelling of the fairy-tale mode. Jade was invited to Durham University by Professor Stephen Regan in 2018 to give a series of guest lectures on her research in the area of textual and theoretical deconstructions of children’s literature. Following from that success, she was invited by Dr Keith O’Sullivan to contribute to the MA in Children’s and Young Adult Literature at Dublin City University in December 2019. These lectures investigated the intertextual broadening of representations of girlhood by means of a cinematic conversation about literature and visual culture.
In 2018, Jade was shortlisted for the ISSCL biennial award for an Outstanding Thesis on Children’s Literature. In 2019 and 2020 respectively, she was awarded a mentorship from the International Research Society of Children’s Literature with Professor Kenneth B. Kidd. She was also awarded a position at the Children’s Literature Summer School 2019 at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. This is a prestigious programme that develops the research skills of children’s literature scholars worldwide.
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