NCTEAR 2025 Conference
Discovering Narratives of Hope
February 28 - March 2, 2025
Columbus, Ohio
Featured Keynote Speakers
Discovering Narratives of Hope
February 28 - March 2, 2025
Columbus, Ohio
Featured Keynote Speakers
Saturday, March 1, 2025
Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Ph.D., (she/her) is Chair of the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan’s Marsal Family School of Education, as well as Associate Professor of Education. She is the author of The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019), which won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Children’s Literature Association Book Award, among other accolades. Her most recent books are Harry Potter and the Other: Race, Justice, and Difference in the Wizarding World (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) co-edited with Sarah Park Dahlen, and Restorying Young Adult Literature: Expanding Students’ Perspectives with Digital Texts (NCTE, 2023) co-authored with James Joshua Coleman and Autumn A. Griffin.
Saturday, March 1, 2025
Dr. David Low, Ph.D., (he/him) is an Associate Professor of Literacy Education at California State University, Fresno. A former high school English teacher and cartoonist in Tucson, AZ, David trained as a researcher of literacy, language, and culture at NYU and Penn GSE. His 2024 book was a study of transgressive humor as a form of social critique in secondary ELA classrooms. Much of his other work explores how reading and composing multimodally facilitates students’ enactments of critical literacy—in particular, with the medium of comics. David was the 2023 recipient of the Arthur Applebee Award for Excellence in Research on Literacy as well as the 2023 Divergent Publication Award. His work has been published in journals including Journal of Literacy Research, Research in the Teaching of English, Language Arts, Written Communication, English Journal, English Education, Gender & Education, and Pedagogies. He serves on the Executive Committee of ELATE and is past chair and past program chair of the AERA Literature SIG..
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Dr. Sanjuana C. Rodriguez, Ph.D., (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Literacy Education and co-director of the Academy for Language and Literacy at Kennesaw State University. She is one of the current co-editors of The Reading Teacher. Dr. Rodriguez is a former elementary grades teacher and literacy coach. Her research interests include early literacy development of culturally and linguistically diverse students, diverse children's literature, and the experiences of Latinx pre-and in-service teachers. She has published in various journals, including the Journal of Children’s Literature, Teachers and Teaching, and Race Ethnicity and Education. She is the co-author of the book Revolutionary Love: Creating a Culturally Inclusive Literacy Classroom.