Lara Saguisag

Lara Saguisag is Associate Professor and the inaugural Georgiou Chair in Children’s Literature and Literacy in the Department of Teaching and Learning. She earned her PhD in Childhood Studies from Rutgers University-Camden; MFA in Creative Writing from The New School; MA in Children’s Literature from Hollins University; and BA in English from the University of the Philippines-Diliman.

Saguisag’s current research, teaching, and community projects are informed by climate justice and energy justice movements. She is investigating the ways children’s cultural forms naturalize and interrogate human relationships with fossil fuels. Through the Children’s Literature Association’s Climate Justice Interest Group, which Saguisag founded and currently convenes, she works with colleagues to develop and promote climate justice pedagogies. With Marek Oziewicz, she co-founded Climate Lit, an open-access web resource for teaching climate change and climate justice through children’s and young adult literature.

Saguisag’s other interests include picture books, comics and graphic novels, Philippine children’s literature, and global childhoods. Her monograph Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (Rutgers UP, 2018) examines how the intertwined discourses of childhood, citizenship, and nationhood were expressed in and complicated by Progressive Era newspaper comics. It received the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society, the Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Single Book from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, and an Eisner nomination for Best Academic/Scholarly Work. Saguisag is also the author of several children’s books, including Animal Games and the award-winning Children of Two Seasons: Poems for Young People.

Prior to joining NYU, Saguisag taught at the College of Staten Island-City University of New York. She served on the Board of the Children’s Literature Association from 2019 to 2022.