Dr. Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo
Assistant Professor of English Dr. Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo contributed a chapter to Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings, a collection edited by Markus Bohlmann and published by Lexington Books in December 2016. Her chapter, “Disidentifying with Futurity: The Unbecoming Child and its Discontents,” theorizes the unbecoming child as a special sort of misfit that fails to fit the parameters of childhood, lacks the potentiality normative children are invested with, and thus highlights the exclusions inherent to contemporary constructions of childhood. The chapter further discusses the unbecoming child within the context of Hawai‘i through a reading of R. Zamora Linmark’s novel Rolling the R’s.
Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings has been reviewed by Jack Halberstam, who calls it “a fantastic new addition to the scholarship on childhood and various forms of non-conformity,” and by Kenneth B. Kidd, who finds it “a fun and lively volume on misfit kids of all sorts” that is “an essential contribution to childhood studies.”
Dr. Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo
Dr. Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo is Assistant Professor of English at UHWO, where she teaches courses in the fields of children’s and adolescent literature, feminist and queer theory, British literature, and folktales and fairy tales. Her article “Can the Child Speak?” appeared in The Middle Ground Journal, and she is a regular reviewer for the fairy-tale studies journal Marvels & Tales. Dr. Nolte-Odhiambo is currently co-editing the collection Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture: New Perspectives in Childhood Studies and Animal Studies, forthcoming with Routledge in 2017.