Non-guaranteed panel at MLA 2027 co-sponsored by the Children’s Literature Association and the MLA forum on Science and Literature. This panel seeks papers on how children’s and young adult literature has engaged the natural sciences across historical and contemporary contexts, including plants, animals, evolution, and the scientific study of the natural world. We invite papers exploring the diverse ways literature for children and young adults mediates knowledge of the natural world, sometimes to instruct, sometimes to inspire wonder, sometimes to question the very authority of empirical observation. How does a text balance the excitement of botanical, zoological, or ecological discovery with the weight of explanation? How do stories about plants, animals, or natural environments also reveal societal convictions about race, gender, empire, or disability? How do narratives of natural history both celebrate and constrain the scope of scientific inquiry?

In considering these questions, this panel highlights that the natural sciences in children’s literature are never merely “neutral” information. Representations of plants, animals, and the natural world are always already shaped by cultural values, institutional power, and social hierarchies. We welcome papers that focus on the ways natural scientific discourses in children’s literature participate in broader debates about who counts as a credible observer of nature, what forms of ecological and biological knowledge gain institutional recognition, and how literary engagements with the natural sciences shape young readers’ understanding of the living world.

Suggested Topics for papers include but are not limited to:

• Botanical and zoological wonder: Narratives where botany, zoology, or natural history function as sites of knowledge production, examining the ways scientific observation of plants and animals might intersect with colonial classification systems, indigenous knowledge, or challenges to empirical authority.
• Evolution and adaptation: Literary engagements with Darwinian evolution, natural selection, and adaptation, examining how children’s texts have popularized, contested, or reimagined evolutionary science from the nineteenth century to the present.
• Climate and ecology: From nineteenth-century nature writing to contemporary climate fiction, examining the ways children’s literature imagines environmental science and the question of planetary survival.
• Animal encounters and interspecies relations: Narratives that foreground human-animal relationships, examining how children’s literature represents animals as scientific subjects, companions, or figures through which questions of sentience, ethics, and ecological interdependence are explored.
• Natural history and classification: The role of taxonomy, specimen collecting, and natural history museums in children’s literature, examining how classificatory practices reflect and reinforce cultural assumptions about order, hierarchy, and the boundaries of the knowable world.
• Pedagogical encounters with the natural world: Literature that directly teaches or critiques knowledge of the natural sciences, whether through nature primers, popular science series, field guides for children, or playful counter-experiments that subvert traditional modes of observing and understanding nature.

Please send abstracts of 200-300 words and a short bio to Maryam Khorasani, ma.khorasani@ufl.edu, and Jennifer Lieberman, jlieberman@ccac.edu, by March 20, 2026.