Clare Bradford

2009 Trudeau Visiting Fellow

Clare Bradford is a professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research examines the interplay between children's literature and the social practices which it represents and advocates. She has focused especially on representations of Indigenous peoples and cultures in children's texts, and on Indigenous textuality for children, publishing two books on this topic: Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature (2001), and Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children's Literature (2007), in addition to many essays. Unsettling Narratives is the first comparative study of settler society literatures for children, embracing Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and US texts. A second strand of research has examined how children’s literature following the end of the Cold War has engaged with political, social and environmental questions, addressed in her book New World Orders in Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations (2008), co-authored with three Australian colleagues. A third collaborative project has focused on Australian children's texts since 1990, exploring the values they promote relating to multiculturalism, immigration and community relations. She was a member of a SSHRC-funded team, based at University of Winnipeg, which focused on discourses of home in Canadian children's literature.
Her books have attracted international prizes: Reading Race was awarded the International Research Society for Children's Literature Award in 2003 as well as the Children's Literature Association Book Award for the best critical work published in 2001. Unsettling Narratives received the Children's Literature Association's Honor Award. Clare Bradford was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2011. She is currently the president of the International Research Society for Children's Literature.
Clare Bradford grew up in New Zealand and completed her B.A. at the University of Auckland and her M.A. and M.Ed. at Victoria University of Wellington. She shifted to Australia to undertake her Ph.D. at the University of Sydney, and now lives and works in Melbourne.