Fuling Deng received her PhD in Education from the University of Glasgow. She also holds a Med in Children’s Literature and Literacies. Research interests include: Asian postmodern picturebooks, Multimodality and intermediality of picturebooks, Teacher’s knowledge and response to picturebooks.

Dr Anna Gasperini is Lecturer in Children’s Literature and Culture at the University of Galway, Ireland. Anna’s research focuses on child health from a literary and historical perspective. She is the PI of the Irish Research Council Laureate Project “MILC - MedIcal Literature and Communication about Child health”, a transnational comparative study of childcare literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Previously, she received funding within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions scheme to develop a project on transnational comparative children’s literature and child nutrition in England and Italy at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She is the author of the 2019 Palgrave Macmillan monograph Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine, and Anatomy - The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act.

Elena Guerzoni earned her PhD in Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Bologna, where she is Teaching Assistant and Adjunct Professor in Children’s Literature and a member of the Scientific Council of the CRLI – Centro di Ricerca in Letteratura per l’Infanzia [Research Centre in Children’s Literature]. Her doctoral research has investigated the history of Young Adult Literature and the representations of adolescence within contemporary Youth Fiction. She has conducted research at the International Youth Library in Munich and at the Department of Literature of the University of Antwerp. Among her recent publications: Come un fiume. Adolescenza e Youth Fiction: ritratti di identità metamorfiche [Like a River. Adolescence and Youth Fiction: Portraits of Metamorphic Identities], La scuola di Pitagora, Napoli 2025; Letteratura Young Adult [Young Adult Literature], in A. Nobile (ed.), Dizionario di Letteratura Giovanile. Generi, temi, problemi [Dictionary of Children’s and YA Lietarture. Genres, Themes, Problems], Morcelliana-Scholé, Brescia 2025; Letteratura Young Adult. Definizioni di un genere ‘irrequieto’ [Young Adult Literature. Definitions of a ‘Restless’ Genre], in A. Nobile, A. Mazzini (eds.), Letteratura per l’infanzia? Morfologia di una disciplina in trasformazione [Children’s Literature? Morphology of a Discipline Undergoing Transformation], Studium-Marcianum Press, Venezia 2024.