Rebekah Fitzsimmons

I am an Associate Teaching Professor at the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

I completed a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship in the School of Literature, Media and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 2015-2019, where I also served as the Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program from 2018-2019. I completed my PhD and MA in English Literature at the University of Florida. I completed my BA in Creative Writing and English at Emory University.

My research focuses on children’s and young adult literature and culture, especially on the social and intellectual history of children’s literature in the United States. I am especially interested in markers of prestige and popularity, such as prizes, bestseller lists, and “best of” lists and how they serve to circulate various forms of capital (social, cultural, political, economic) in the children’s literature field. I have written about these issues in multiple publications, including an article on the NYTimes creation of a Children’s Best Seller list in response to the Harry Potter phenomenon and a book chapter on how blockbuster book culture is creating a new hyper-canon of children’s and YA texts.

My work, including my dissertation titled “The Chronicles of Professionalization: The Expert, the Child, and the Making of American Children’s Literature,” looks at the various forms of expertise and professionalism that shapes the field of children’s literature. I am currently working on a Digital Humanities project, analyzing a corpora of texts drawn from one of these early “book women,” Caroline Hewins. Her 1882 list of “Books for the Young” is often cited as a foundational canonical project in the field of children’s literature; my work makes use of data mining techniques and stylometric analysis to look at the similarities and defining characteristics of the books selected for children at this early date.