Professor Karen A. Krasny has been appointed 2017-18 York Visiting Scholar to Massey College at the University of Toronto. While at Massey, Dr. Krasny will be engaged in a special project dedicated to the advancement of book history titled The autonomy of the child reader: The impact of 18th and 19th century developments in illustration and typography that will make use of the collections in the College’s Robertson Davies Library and Toronto Public Libraries’ Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. Her work also draws on her research in theoretical models and processes of reading with Dr. Mark Sadoski (Texas A&M) that extends the structure and function of imagery and affect in Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory to account for the comprehension of multimodal texts. Her investigation explores a range of printing technologies leading up to the golden age of children’s book illustration dating from the mid-19th century to early 20th century to make reading an engaging and independent enterprise for children. Dr. Krasny is looking forward to an exciting and productive year and to contributing to the Massey College community.
