Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer is a professor of children’s literature at Tilburg University and Leiden University in the Netherlands and chair of the Dutch IBBY-section. Her main research interests are literary socialization, adolescent literature, the history of Dutch children’s literature and (post)colonialism in children’s books. In 2005 she published a book in Dutch on the adolescent novel in literature education: Over grenzen. De adolescentenroman in het literatuuronderwijs (About Borders. The Adolescent Novel in Literature Education).  She is one of the editors of a new history on children’s literature in the Dutch language area and of Literatuur zonder leeftijd (Literature  Without Age-Limits), the only academic journal on children’s literature in the Netherlands, and member of the advisory board of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature, IRCL.