Paula Connolly Honored As Teaching, Research Award Finalist

Paula Connolly of the Department of English  is one of three nominees for the College’s Integration of Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award. The other two nominees are Robin James of Philosophy and Joe Kuhns and Criminal Justice and Criminology.

Connolly is an associate professor in the English Department, where she is the coordinator of the department’s children’s literature programs, including the Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies minor. She teaches a range of undergraduate courses in childhood studies focusing on children’s literature and film, including “Multiculturalism and Children’s Literature,” “Disney and Children’s Literature,” “Literature for Young Children,” and “Classics in British Children’s Literature.” Those courses in many ways reflect her research. Her recent book, Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790-2010 (University of Iowa Press, 2013), examines how slavery and race have been presented in children’s literature.

Connolly has also published essays examining how children’s picture books represent such traumatic events as the 9/11 attacks, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina. Connolly also explores the more playful nature of children’s literature and film in her recent chapter “The Metafictive Playgrounds of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh: the movie is a book” which appears in Walt Disney, From Reader to Storyteller: Essays on the Literary Inspirations.

Connolly serves on the editorial boards of Children’s Literature in Education: An International Quarterly and RISE (Reading Inspires Success in Education): A Children’s Literacy Journal. An Invited Visiting Scholar at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts and recipient of a Faculty Research Grant from the Children’s Literature Association, she is currently the recipient of the Caleb Loring, Jr. Fellowship from the Boston Athenaeum where she will be a research fellow this summer.

Connolly’s work has always been driven by her belief in the integral relationship of teaching and research. It is during undergraduate years when students not only find their fields of study, but also their professional fields. “University teaching at the undergraduate level is thus a tremendously important enterprise, one made stronger when teachers bring their research into the classroom,” she said.

Students note her influence on them. “Quality, creativity, and sustainability – three words that describe Walt Disney – also describe Dr. Paula Connolly,” one student stated. “Drawing upon her vast scholarship of teaching, integration, and application, Dr. Connolly is for me as much the gifted teacher as Walt Disney is the master storyteller.”