Karín Lesnik-Oberstein is Professor of Critical Theory and the Director of the ‘Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media (CIRCL)’ and the M(Res) in Children’s Literature in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, Reading, UK. Her research is in the area of trans- and interdisciplinary critical theory, particularly as it relates to issues of identity, especially childhood across all disciplines. In terms of teaching, Karín’s commitment is to following her students at all levels in their questioning of their own thinking and reading, not about teaching ‘content’ or approaches. Her publications include the monographs Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (1994) and On Having an Own Child: Reproductive Technologies and the Cultural Construction of Childhood (2008), the edited volumes (as editor and contributor): Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (1998), ‘Children in Literature’ (a special issue of the Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 32, 2002), Children’s Literature: New Approaches (2004), The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair (2006), Children in Culture, Revisited: Further Approaches to Childhood (2011), Rethinking Disability Theory and Practice: Challenging Essentialism (2015), and a wide range of chapters and articles reading constructions of identities and claims to the ‘real’ in fields ranging from children’s literature to mathematics.