June Cummins, Associate Professor
Ph.D., Columbia University

Office: AL-217
Phone: 594-5442
e-mail: jcummins@mail.sdsu.edu

June Cummins specializes in children's literature and Jewish-American literature; she also has a background in modern British literature. She has published on Curious George, Harry Potter, Beauty and the Beast, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, Sydney Taylor, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Virginia Woolf and other subjects.

A selected list of her articles includes:

Publications:

• “Hermione in the Bathroom: The Gothic, Menarche, and Female Development in the Harry Potter Series.” The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. Eds. Karen Coats, Anna Jackson, and Rod McGillis. New York: Routledge, 2008: 177-93.
  
  
• “Leaning Left: Progressive Politics in Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family Series.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 30.4 (Winter 2005): 386-408.
  
  
• “Understood Betsy, Understood Nation: Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Willa Cather Queer America.” Children’s Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Division on Children’s Literature and The Children’s Literature Association 32 (2004): 15-40.
  
  
• "Becoming An All-of-A-Kind American: Sydney Taylor and Strategies of Assimilation." The Lion and the Unicorn, 2003.

• "'You Should Not Loiter Longer': Christina Rossetti, Beatrix Potter, and Progressive Intertextual Revision." Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit: A Children's Classic at 100. Ed. Margaret Mackey. (Lanham, MD: Scareprow Press), 2002.

• "Packaging Potter, Packaging Children: Harry Potter and Compulsory Consumerism." Times Higher Education Supplement, December 12, 2001.

• "The Jewish Child in Picture Books?" The Five Owls (Nov.-Dec. 2000) 38-40. (Co-authored with Naomi Toder.)

• "Laura and the 'Lunatic Fringe': Gothic Encoding in Laura Ingalls Wilder's These Happy Golden Years," Children's Literature Association Quarterly (Winter 1999): 187-93

• "The Resisting Monkey: Curious George, Slave Captivity Narratives, and the Postcolonial Condition." Ariel 28.1 (1997) 70-83

• "Romancing the Plot: The Real Beast of Disney's Beauty and the Beast." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 20.1 (Spring 1995), 22-28

Current Research:

• Children and consumerism, Sydney Taylor and Jewish children's literature, American national identity and children's literature, multiculturalism

Back to Faculty Page