Lara Saguisag

Lara Saguisag is Associate Professor and Georgiou Chair in Children’s Literature and Literacy in the Department of Teaching and Learning. Prior to joining NYU, Saguisag taught at the College of Staten Island-City University of New York. 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. 

Climate justice and energy justice movements inform Dr. Saguisag’s current research, teaching, and community projects. Through a new book project, she is investigating the ways children’s cultural forms naturalize and interrogate human relationships with fossil fuels. With Dr. 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.

Dr. Saguisag is also committed to the development of global Filipino Studies. She is particularly interested in studying how Filipino/American children's literature consider issues of labor, race, and the Philippines' colonial relationship with the United States. As a member of the steering committee of Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU, she works to promote interdisciplinary and community-oriented scholarship. One of her projects under Sulo is the public syllabus Here Lies Love in Critical Contexts, which she co-authored with Dr. Nerve V. Macaspac (Queens College-CUNY).

Dr. Saguisag’s 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. Dr. 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.

She is an active member of the Children’s Literature Association, and has served ChLA as member/chair of the International Committee and Diversity Committee and member of the Board of Directors. She is currently Associate Editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society (2024-2026).