Elina Druker Professor

My research has primarily focused on children's literature, modernism, and the avant-garde, with particular emphasis on illustration, picturebook aesthetics, and intermedial relations.

In January 2027, I will begin a new research project on Camilla Mickwitz, one of Finland's most significant children's book illustrators. She also played an important role in the development of animation and children's television in the Nordic countries during the 1970s and 1980s. The project also examines the contributions of women animators to the development of children's television and animated film in Finland and the wider Nordic region. The two-year project is funded by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS).

Picturebooks have been central to several of my previous research projects. In my doctoral dissertation, Modernismens bilder (Images of Modernism2008), I examined modernism in Nordic picturebooks during the 1940s and 1950s. I explored this subject further in a monograph on the picturebook artist Eva Billow (2014).

A historical perspective on children's literature and its relationship to the avant-garde, art, and media was further developed in Children's Literature and the Avant-Garde (2015), a collaborative project with Professor Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. The volume was the first international study of the relationship between children's literature and the European avant-garde and received two international awards in 2017: the IRSCL Edited Book Award and the ChLA Edited Book Award. Together, we also co-edited Photography in Children’s Literature (2023), one of the few international studies examining the role of photography in children's literature.

I was a member of the editorial team and one of the principal authors of Den svenska barn- och ungdomslitteraturens historia (2024), a two-volume history of Swedish children's and young adult literature spanning more than 700 years.

I am a board member of European Network of Picturebook Research and a former jury member of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2011-2023). Since 2011, I have been a series editor of Children's Literature, Culture and Cognition, published by John Benjamins (Amsterdam). In 2019 I was co-organizer for the IRSCL confrence in Stockholm with the theme "Silence and Silencing".

Read more about our research in children's literature at the Department here:

Children's and young adult Literature