Beyond words and images, picturebooks are physical objects whose materiality contributes fundamentally to the construction of meaning and to readers’ experiences (Angelaki, 2024; Athanasiou-Krikelis & Vassiloudi, 2025; Campagnaro, 2019; Do Rozario, 2012; Kümmerling-Meibauer, 2018; Ramos, 2016; Veryeri Alaca, 2019). The 11th European Network of Picturebook Research Conference, More than Words and Pictures: Exploring Materiality in Picturebooks, builds upon the growing body of scholarship on picturebook materiality, including research presented at previous conferences of the European Network of Picturebook Research, by inviting new perspectives and innovative approaches to this evolving field.
Recent research has increasingly drawn attention to the “bookishness” of picturebooks (Pressman, 2009), highlighting how meaning emerges through the interplay of verbal and visual content with material features such as format, design, paper, typography, and interactive elements. Drawing on a range of complementary theoretical frameworks, this conference seeks to extend these discussions by encouraging new perspectives, emerging methodologies, and innovative approaches to the study of the picturebook as a material artefact.
Picturebooks, understood as historical artefacts shaped by technological developments, publishing practices, cultural values, and social conditions, invite, within the field of Book History, attention to their material forms as integral to storytelling. As “materiality is content and content is materiality” (Hayles, 2002), the material dimensions of picturebooks actively contribute to narrative construction and influence readers’ experiences (Schulz, 2019).
Drawing on insights from Sensory Studies, which challenge the traditional privileging of vision and recognizing reading as an embodied, multisensory experience involving touch, hearing, smell, taste, movement, and bodily awareness, picturebooks can be understood as multisensory objects experienced through embodied reading (Kucirkova, 2024; Mackey, 2016; Spence, 2020).
At the same time, approached through the perspective of Multimodality, picturebooks can be understood as compositions of multiple interacting semiotic modes, each contributing to storytelling through its specific “affordances.” Rather than emerging from words and images alone, meaning is constructed through the interaction of verbal, visual, typographic, spatial, auditory, haptic, and material modes that together shape meaning-making processes and readers’ experiences (Serafini, 2024).
Further, through the lens of Play Studies, picturebooks can be approached as playful material objects whose interactive features invite readers to manipulate, experiment, and actively engage with narratives. Understanding play as a creative and meaning-making practice shaped by the interaction of imagination, material objects, and bodily action, this perspective positions interactive picturebooks as spaces of exploration, participation, and playful engagement (Reid-Walsh, 2017).
Extending beyond human-centered understandings of meaning-making, New Materialist approaches conceptualize the picturebook not as a passive container of narrative but as a material “assemblage” in which paper, design, mechanisms, images, words, readers, and environments become entangled. From this perspective, material features actively participate in the reading event, contributing to how stories are experienced and meanings are produced (Murris, 2016).
In addition, considering the ecological dimensions of materiality through the lenses of Ecocriticism and Material Ecocriticism, picturebooks can be understood not only as cultural but also as ecological objects embedded within networks of extraction, production, circulation, and transformation (Op de Beeck, 2005). Their materials carry environmental histories that reveal the connections between books, human practices, and the more-than-human world.
Approaches to accessibility and inclusive design, informed by insights from Disability Studies, highlight the importance of the materiality of picturebooks in shaping readers’ experiences. Format, typography, tactile elements, sensory features, page structures, and interactive mechanisms influence who can access books and how diverse readers, including blind and visually impaired readers (Claudet, 2014), engage with them. From this perspective, accessibility is understood not as an additional feature but as an integral dimension of material design and communication.
Moreover, through the lens of Material Culture Studies, picturebooks can be approached not only as texts to be read but also as material and cultural objects. This perspective is particularly evident in artistic and experimental picturebooks (Beckett, 2012), as well as contemporary nostalgic picturebooks, in which the materiality of the book itself is frequently incorporated into the fictional narrative (Yannicopoulou, 2026).
References
- Angelaki, R. T. (2024). Materiality, metafiction and “the reality of fantasy” in contemporary picturebooks. Magistra Iadertina, 19 (2), 109–138.
- Athanasiou-Krikelis, L., & Vassiloudi, V. (2025). Bookishness and metafictionality in the material picturebook. Children’s Literature in Education, 56 (3), 494–512.
- Beckett, S. L. (2012). Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for all Ages. Routledge.
- Campagnaro, M. (2019). Do touch! How Bruno Munari’s picturebooks work. Rivista di Storia dell’ Educazione, 6 (1), 57–70. dell’ E
- Claudet, P. (Ed.). (2014). The Typhlo & Tactus Guide to Children’s Books with Tactile Illustrations. Les Doigts Qui Rêvent.
- Do Rozario, R. A. C. (2012). Consuming books: Synergies of materiality and narrative in picturebooks. Children’s Literature, 40 (1), 151–166.
- European Network of Picturebook Research. (n.d.). Publications. https://picturebookresearch.fcsh.unl.pt/publications/
- Hayles, N. K. (2002). Writing Machines. MIT Press.
- Kucirkova, N. (2024). The explanatory power of sensory reading for early childhood research: The role of hidden senses. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 25 (1), 93–109.
- Kümmerling-Meibauer, B. (Ed.). (2018). The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Routledge.
- Mackey, M. (2016). Literacy as material engagement: Τhe abstract, tangible and mundane ingredients of childhood reading. Literacy, 50 (3), 166–172.
- Murris, K. (2016). The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation through Philosophy with Picturebooks. Routledge.
- Op de Beeck, N. (2005). Speaking for the trees: Environmental ethics in the rhetoric and production of picture books. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 30 (3), 265–287.
- Pressman, J. (2009). The aesthetic of bookishness in twenty-first-century literature. Michigan Quarterly Review 48 (4), 465–482.
- Ramos, A. M. (2016). On the liminality of the picturebook: The case of mix-and-match books. History of Education & Children’s Literature, 11 (1), 205–213.
- Reid-Walsh, J. (2018). Interactive Books: Playful Media before Pop-ups. Routledge.
- Schulz, C.B. (Ed.) (2019). Die Geschich te(n) gefalteter Bücher. Georg Olms Verlag.
- Serafini, F. (2024). The instantiation of narrative in picturebook forms: Semiotic, material, and ideological dimensions. Libri & Liberi: Journal of Research on Children’s Literature and Culture, 13 (1), 9–26.
- Spence, C. (2020). The multisensory experience of handling and reading books. Multisensory Research, 33 (8), 902–928.
- Veryeri Alaca, I. (Guest Ed.). (2019). Materiality in picturebooks [Special issue]. Libri & Liberi: Journal of Research on Children’s Literature and Culture, 8 (2). https://hrcak.srce.hr/en/broj/18339
- Yannicopoulou, A. (2026). Fictionalising the book-object in nostalgic picturebooks. In S. Narančić Kovač & N. Novaković (Eds.), The Picturebook between Fiction and Reality (pp. 117–132). Routledge.
The 11th European Network of Picturebook Research Conference, More than Words and Pictures: Exploring Materiality in Picturebooks, invites researchers to consider the picturebook as a complex material artefact whose “thingness” is fundamental to the creation of meaning and to readers’ experiences.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- The relationship between book form and narrative possibilities
- Multimodality and the materiality of the picturebook
- Material affordances and children’s engagement with books
- Multisensory picturebooks and embodied reading practices
- Interactive mechanisms and playful reading practices
- Material agency and the active role of book forms in storytelling
- Reader–book relationships from a new materialist perspective
- Disability, accessible picturebooks and inclusive material design
- Picturebooks’ materiality and nostalgia
- Artists’ and experimental picturebooks
- Sustainable materials and environmentally conscious picturebook design
- Picturebook’s materiality and characters, settings, focalization
- Materiality and intertextuality, metafiction, humor
- Ideology and picturebooks’ materiality
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Individual paper proposals should include the following information:
- Presenter’s name, affiliation, email address
- Brief biography (maximum 100 words)
- Paper title (maximum 10 words)
- Abstract (approximately 300 words)
- 4 relevant keywords
- 5 academic references (APA7) and a list of up to 5 picturebooks
Please send an abstract in English along with (a) short bio(s) as two separate attached Word documents to
All submissions will be blindly reviewed by the members of the Reading Committee. English will be the working language of the conference.
Each paper presentation will be allotted a maximum of 20 minutes, followed by a 10-minute discussion
Important Dates
Abstract submission deadline: 15/ 12/ 2026
[Quelle: ibby]