Autumn 2007 saw one of the major events for the Beyond the Book project: our conference on Contemporary Cultures of Reading which ended the second project year of our AHRC-funded research on mass reading events. Over 120 scholars and practitioners from 19 countries descended on the University of Birmingham, representing a cross-section of disciplines including English literature, sociology, education, African-American studies, linguistics, performance studies, criminology, library science, publishing studies and cultural studies. A third of participants were practitioners working outside academia as, for example, Reader Advisory librarians, book festival organizers, facilitators of reading programmes for socially marginalized communities (e.g. prisoners, vulnerable teens, seniors, recovering addicts). Over three days, the topics covered ranged from the circulation of urban fiction among women in US prisons to the effect of blogging on the dissemination of poetry, and from projects using reading to assist in recuperation from brain surgery to online Chinese time-travel romances.
The abstracts are archived here. The full schedule is archived here. The original 'Call for Papers' is available here, and the conference poster can be accessed here.
Three publications feature articles based on presentations given at the conference:
Lang, Anouk (ed.) From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press (forthcoming 2012).
Special Issue of Journal of Popular Narrative Media 1.2 (2008). Edited by Nikkianne Moodie.
Special issue of Particip@tions: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 5.2. (2008). Guest Edited by Dru Pagliassotti. Journal Editor: Martin Barker.