Roberta Seelinger Trites
Roberta Seelinger Trites is a Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Illinois State University, specializing in children's literature.
Trites graduated from Texas A&M University in 1983, and earned a master's degree from the University of Texas at Dallas in 1985. She received her Ph.D. in 1991 from Baylor University with a dissertation entitled Twain's innocence, Clemens' experience : narrative inconsistencies in The Innocents Abroad under the direction of James R. LeMaster. She joined the Illinois State faculty as an assistant professor in 1991,
and became Distinguished Professor in 2013.
She has written the following books:
- Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels.
- Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. This book was awarded the Children's Literature Association book award in 2002.
- Twain, Alcott and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel.
- A Narrative Compass: Stories that Guide Women’s Lives.
- Literary Conceptualizations of Growth: Metaphors and Cognition in Adolescent Literature.