My name is Gabriel Duckels. I am an Early Career Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. I recently completed my PhD in Education at the University of Cambridge as a Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholar.

I am an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of children’s literature and childhood studies; queer youth studies in popular culture and education; HIV/AIDS sociology; and the study of aesthetics, culture, and pedagogy. I am a member of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Homerton College and the Faculty of Education, Cambridge. You can read my scholarship profile here and — if so inclined — read an interview about my research and bibliographic interests here. To get in touch, please email me: gld31@cam.ac.uk

Broadly, I am interested in the cultural politics of emergencies and moral panics in youth culture and their representation in young people’s literature, media, and education. My doctoral thesis provides an international history of the role of children’s and Young Adult texts in the AIDS crisis from the mid-1980s to the present day. I have published research developed from my doctoral thesis and other research projects, in journals such as the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly; Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures; the European Journal of Cultural Studies; Mortality; Issues in English; and the Journal of Historical Fictions. Topics include: critical content analysis of the “emergency children’s literature” produced during the first COVID-19 lockdowns in the United Kingdom; comparative analysis of international wordless picture books about the migrant crisis; queer pedagogical approaches to the representation of culturally and geographically diverse LGBTQ+ AIDS histories in popular culture and children’s literature. I am particularly interested in how (and with what limits) mainstream cultural forms can be repurposed to give shape to social justice and marginalised subjects.

I am often invited to contribute to edited collections and have forthcoming chapters on the literary history of sentimentality and sensation in children’s literature, historical HIV/AIDS picture books, queer pedagogy and LGBTQ+ biographical picture books, and narrative approaches to COVID-19 in education. I recently co-edited a forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Young Adult Literature on youth sexuality in Young Adult novels. I have reviewed books for journals including International Research in Children’s Literature, the Journal of LGBT Youth, the International Journal of Young Adult Literature, Migration Studies, and Childhood & Society. For a full list of my published and forthcoming research, please see here.

In addition to winning numerous prizes and pots of funding, I have worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Cambridge, the Open University, and Anglia Ruskin University. My work as a Research Assistant includes supporting an EU Horizon 2020 Project (DIALLS) exploring cultural literacy in European schools; a small-scale educational research project on reading for pleasure in public and school libraries; and bid-writing for an AHRC project on the censorship of “inclusive” children’s literature in education. I have plenty of teaching experience relative to my career stage, at undergraduate, graduate, and foundation level. I have served as a peer reviewer for numerous journals. Prior to entering academia, I worked in various roles in public and academic libraries in Hampshire and Cambridge, as well as a brief stint running an ice cream shop.