Derritt Mason

My primary research and teaching interests sit at the intersection of children's and young adult literature, queer theory, and cultural studies. I am the author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture (UP of Mississippi, 2021). With Kenneth B. Kidd, I co-edited Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (Fordham UP, 2019), which won the Children's Literature Association Edited Book Award in 2021. Otherwise, my publications include essays on:

• Teaching and learning with "Let's Play" videos (Teaching & Learning Inquiry 9.1)
• The history of queer representation in picture books (Literary Cultures and Twenty-First Century Childhoods, 2020)
• Horror and slasher film tropes in queer young adult literature (with Joshua Whitehead, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature 2.1)
• A queer adolescent trope I call the "Earnest Elfin Dream Gay" (Public Books, 2018)
• Queer visibility in the first North American young adult novel with gay content (Children's Literature Association Quarterly 41.3)
• The It Gets Better anti-bullying YouTube project (ESC: English Studies in Canada 38.3-4)
• The history of childhood and perversity (Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 3.1)

I also co-edited, with Ela Przybylo, a special issue of ESC (40.1) entitled Hysteria Manifest: Cultural Lives of a Great Disorder. For more, see my personal webpage.

I welcome undergraduate and graduate students who wish to pursue research in areas including children's and young adult literature, gender and sexuality studies, critical theory, and cultural studies. In my own research and teaching, I enjoy thinking across media and form; I draw on film, comics, video games, fan fiction, and a variety of digital texts in addition to print literature and theory, and I encourage students to do the same. I am currently supervising/co-supervising PhD projects on Asian diasporic Young Adult Literature (S. Yu) and the transmedia circulation of Dungeons & Dragons (S. Bauhart); my current MA supervisions include a young adult novel about HIV/AIDS (X. Virtue) and a critical project on child rights in His Dark Materials (A. Tripathi). I have supervised a Master's thesis on queerness in video games and video game literature (L. Brooks), and English Honours projects on topics ranging from Harry Potter time travel fan fiction to feminism and Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

At the undergraduate level, I often teach ENGL 396 (Literature for Young People), a class in which my students and I question the boundaries of how we typically imagine children's and young adult literature. I have also designed and taught undergraduate classes on dystopian young adult literature, queer children's literature, and queer theory and video games. At the graduate level, I have offered several classes on queer theory and young adult fiction. I have also taught undergraduate and graduate versions of "The Virtual Child," a seminar on digital texts for young people. My teaching has been recognized by a Faculty of Arts Award for Outstanding Early Career Teacher (2020) and a Students' Union Teaching Excellence Award (2021).

I am currently serving as President of the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (2021-2023).

• Courses