M.A. alum Joe Sutliff Sanders has enjoyed a successful career researching and teaching children’s and adolescent literature. He is especially passionate about children’s literature’s ability to examine difference and contest marginalization. His most recent passion, as you see here, is “punting” on the river Cam between his scholarly duties in his new job at Cambridge (yes, that Cambridge). Read, below, a quick update on what he has been up to since wrapping up his graduate degree at the U of A.
Joe Sutliff Sanders’ path since graduating with his M.A. in English in 1997 has been strange indeed. He has held teaching positions in Japanese junior high schools, an NEH fellowship, posts at universities across the country, and now a faculty position at the University of Cambridge. His thesis at Arkansas, written more from passion for the books and a supportive supervisor than any kind of professional strategy, examined The Lord of the Rings. It was in writing this thesis that he discovered the thrill of unearthing shelves of scholarship by perfectly intelligent people writing about bizarre, noncanonical texts and ideas. One day, lost in just such criticism, he found himself in the suddenly pitch-black library. He groped his way out of his carrel, up the stairs, and to a telephone, from which he managed to call a bemused policeman to set him free—Joe had been so immersed in what he was reading that he failed to hear the (repeated) announcements that the library was about to close.
Enthusiasm for deep arguments about the noncanonical has led to a career as a specialist in everything delightful. With two books on classic girls’ novels, a Fulbright fellowship to study the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, and an international reputation for comics scholarship, Joe has managed to continue the rigorous examination of joyous things that he practiced in Fayetteville. His newest monograph, A Literature of Questions, is the first book-length theorization of children’s nonfiction from a literary perspective, and his next project, due out in 2021, is a study of his favorite children’s cartoon. He now lectures and directs graduate projects about children’s literature, animation, comics, and sometimes even The Lord of the Rings. He only takes himself seriously when he is punting on the river Cam, and even then only to please the tourists.
