Maria Chatzianastasi (Hadjianastasi)

Maria Chatzianastasi (Hadjianastasi) is a post-doc researcher at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus. She completed her BA (with a Minor in Psychology) and MA degrees in the Sciences of Education (Primary Education), both with High Honours, at the University of Cyprus. Maria also holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Research Training in the Humanities and Social Sciences and a PhD in children’s literature and linguistics from Newcastle University. Since 2009 she has been working as a primary school teacher. She has worked both in public and private education in Cyprus. She is also a Scientific Collaborator at the European University Cyprus where she has previously taught Children’s Literature modules to undergraduate students of Primary Education. She participates in a number of research organizations including the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) and the Cypriot section of IBBY (Board Member 2013-2015) and she is a member of the Children’s Literature Graduate Unit (School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics – Newcastle University). Maria’s research work has so far been presented at international conferences and published in local and international conference proceedings and journals. Her main research interests involve the aesthetic and pedagogic aspects of children’s literature, children’s literature in education, contemporary trends in children’s literature, new forms and formats in children’s books, the use of wordless texts for inspiring classroom dialogue, multimodality for cultural literacy (DIALLS) and controversial themes in children’s literature. Her role in DIALLS involves the selection and trial of wordless texts with students of primary education (WP2), the cooperation with teachers for the development of CLLP, teachers’ professional development and working with wordless texts and pre-primary to secondary school students (WP3).