About

For all her academic life, Dr. Amy Sonheim has jumped down the rabbit hole to follow the first question posed by Alice: “what is the use of a book . . . without pictures or conversations?”

Taking her lead from the King of all Wild Things himself, Maurice Sendak, Sonheim embraces the lively experience of reading picture books as listening to multiple stories. When one reads a picture book, she hears words tell one version, sees pictures nuance that version, and follows the format for contexts.

Attending Wheaton College for her B.A., Baylor for her M.A., and The University of Missouri-Columbia for her Ph.D., Sonheim has published on the dialogue between art history and narrative. Before earning her doctorate, she published her first book Maurice Sendak (Twayne, 1991). In 1994, her doctoral monograph queried the unnerving way that pictures drawn by Pre-Raphaelite Arthur Hughes countered portraits of fairy-tale princesses written by George MacDonald. Over the last six years, Sonheim has published on Harry Potter with former student-now colleague-Dr. Josh Richards; on Sendak for PMLA; on trauma in David Small’s illustrations for American Imago, a journal in psychoanalysis; and, “Visions of Glory by O’Connor and El Greco” in English Studies (2019).

Active in The Children’s Literature Association, Sonheim recently prizes the graphic novel as a transformative medium. In 2016, she presented “Drawing on Queue, featuring Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints,” based on her research during a National Institute for the Humanities seminar on China and America. In 2018, she delivered Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey by Özge Samanci. In 2020, as Ouachita’s sponsor for the English Honor Society Sigma Tau Delta, she and the president of MORE (Multicultural Organization Reaching Equality), Dayja James are organizing a study of Ebony Flowers’ graphic novel Hot Comb.

Thrilling for Sonheim is the success of her students on a national level. In 2012, Jody Persson won first place in Boston for “Take it to the Porch: Meeting The Other in To Kill a Mockingbird.” In 2019, Ouachita alumnae, children’s librarian Shelby Spears and Creative Non-fiction Professor Sarah Smith presented papers for a round table organized by Sonheim, entitled “In Good Faith? Current Representations of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity for the Common Good.”