About

Cara Byrne’s teaching and research interests explore the complexity and nuance of children’s picture books. She has published articles about children’s book adaptations of Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological work, fourth wave feminism in popular YA fiction, Shakespeare adaptations for children, and police presence in James Baldwin’s children’s book Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. In 2018, she received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Children’s Literature Association.

Her current focus is on health communication for children, and her co-authored forthcoming scholarly monograph, Visible Invasion: Visual Rhetorics of Disease in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, is tentatively scheduled to be published in 2027 by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Her teaching is student-centered with a community-engaged learning focus. In 2018, she co-founded the “Book Buddy” program with Noble Elementary School, which partners first-year undergraduates and 2nd grade students. She was a 2025 recipient of the Carl F. Wittke Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the 2024 recipient of the inaugural AIQS Innovative Teaching Award.

Prior to earning her PhD and MA in English at Case Western Reserve University, she earned a BA in English and a BS in secondary education at Bowling Green State University and worked at an educational non-profit in Akron, Ohio. She currently serves as the Research Advisor on Diverse Children’s Literature for the Schubert Center for Child Studies and is on the editorial board of the Rust Belt Studies: A Journal of Public and Emplaced Humanities.