Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
Poland
justyna.deszcz@uni.wroc.pl
MC Member – WG2, WG3, WG4
Position Paper
Dr. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak is Assistant Professor of Literature and Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies, Wroclaw University, Poland. Her research interests include children’s literature and culture, reader response, utopianism, ecocriticism, and intermediality. As Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture, she organizes and coordinates numerous creative workshops and courses for children and young adults. She also has some background in childhood studies and she is currently investigating possible interactions between this field and children’s literature studies. She is especially interested in young readers’ own perceptions of their reading experience, including reading literature in digital formats. She has recently conducted a study of young readers’ preferences concerning aspects of literature and reading that they find most interesting and worth exploring with the aid of iPad applications. She is also working on social minds, Theory of Mind and empathy in Radical Fantasy fiction for young readers. As a member of three international organizations related to (broadly understood) children’s literature studies and gathering not just researchers but also educators and librarians, she has used these contacts to promote and E-READ and encourage interest in its findings. These organizations are the Children’s Literature Association, the International Research Society for Children’s Literature and the International Board on Books for Young People.