Karín Lesnik-Oberstein studied at the Free University of Amsterdam and the University of Bristol before becoming a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University. She is now Professor of Critical Theory and Director of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media (CIRCL) and the MA(Res) in Children’s Literature in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, in Reading, UK. Her research focuses on transdisciplinary theoretical issues, as in her monographs Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Clarendon Press, 1994) and On Having an Own Child: Reproductive Technologies and the Cultural Construction of Childhood (Karnac, 2007), and numerous articles and chapters on children’s literature, childhood in literature, childhood in the sciences and social sciences, and the philosophy of mathematics. Karín has also edited and contributed to several volumes on childhood, Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (Palgrave, 1998), Children in Literature (a Special Issue of the Yearbook of English Studies, MHRA, volume 32, 2002), Children’s Literature: New Approaches (Palgrave, 2004), and Children in Culture, Revisited: Further Approaches to Childhood (Palgrave, 2011), and on gender, The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair(Manchester University Press, 2007). Karín is currently working on critiques of neuroscience and on an edited volume introducing new theoretical approaches to Disability Studies.