Biography
Courtney Weikle-Mills is an expert on children’s literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Specific research and teaching interests include early American studies, transatlantic and early Caribbean studies, citizenship studies, readership and literacy, justice and ethics, and the history of the book.
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 Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" can be found in The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture (2023). Her work can also be found in Children's Literature, Who Writes for Black Children?: American Children's Literature Before 1900, The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature, Early American Literature, and American Periodicals.
She is working on a new book tentatively titled Sidestepping the Lobster's Claw: Children’s Literature and Ethics in the Atlantic World, which traces children's literature's relationship to Atlantic trade, the circulation of British and American children's literature in the early Caribbean, and the development of "global" children's literature.
She is also the creator of a new 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, as well as diverse local responses and innovations.